Dec 312024
 
 December 31, 2024  Posted by at 11:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  45 Responses »


Leonardo da Vinci Saint John the Baptist 1513-16

 

The Passing and Lessons of Jimmy Carter (Turley)
Trump Endorses Mike Johnson For House Speaker (RT)
Deep State Freezes Over: John Brennan Praises Trump Transition Team (ZH)
Liz Cheney’s Pending Immunity Whiplash (Julie Kelly)
Trump Beat Harris, Could Bolster Russia-US Ties and May Hasten NATO’s End (Sp.)
Lavrov: Russia’s ‘Not Satisfied’ With Trump’s Ukraine Proposals (Antiwar)
Musk To Provide Cellphone Coverage To Ukraine From Space (RT)
Can Elon Musk Actually ‘Influence’ The German Election? (RMX)
No, The Truth Is Not Just Another Story (Kunstler)
Zelensky Is ‘All-time Champion’ of US-Aid Heist – Musk (RT)
Russia and Ukraine Conduct Massive POW Swap (RT)
Kiev Announces US Gift of $15bn From Seized Russian Funds (RT)
Fico Dismisses ‘Nonsense’ Accusations From Zelensky (RT)
Slovak PM Fico Slams ‘Irrational’ EU (RT)
South Korea To Inspect Boeing Fleet After Plane Crash Disaster (RT)
The Disappearance of the Male Role (Paul Craig Roberts)

 

 

 

 

Jennings

Isolate https://twitter.com/i/status/1873878819737837844

 

 

 

 

You can be a great person even if you’re not a great president.

• The Passing and Lessons of Jimmy Carter (Turley)

This morning, the nation is mourning the loss of one of the most genuinely decent men ever to sit in the Oval Office. Even for his critics, Jimmy Carter was a model of empathy and integrity as an American president. After his presidency, he proved an even greater role model, working tirelessly to help those without homes or hope. He gave us 100 years of a life committed to helping others and a lasting lesson on what it means to be truly a public servant. Both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump offered moving tributes to Carter. President Biden noted that Carter showed “what it means to live a life of meaning and purpose, a life of principle, faith and humility.” He added “Some look at Jimmy Carter and see a man of a bygone era with honesty and character. Faith and humility mattered, but I don’t believe it’s a bygone era,” Biden said. “We’d all do well to try to be more like Jimmy Carter.”

President Trump declared “The challenges Jimmy faced as president came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.” Many were surprised when Biden took a jab at Trump after his comments. The media immediately saw the testimonial comments as an opportunity to get a dig on Trump and Biden seemed eager to oblige them. When a reporter asked Biden after his formal remarks what President-elect Trump should take from Carter’s legacy, Biden replied: “Decency, decency, decency. … Can you imagine Jimmy Carter walking by someone who needed something and just keep walking? Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way they look or the way they talk?” It was a jarring disconnect from the moment of unity by both presidents.

It was also a curious choice of presidents for Biden to make the comparison. There is another thing that Carter would not do: pardon a family member in an influence-peddling scandal. Throughout his presidency, Carter was faced with allegations that Billy Carter took $200,000 from a Libyan dictator as a “loan” and only paid back $1000. There were also allegations of even more money derived from open influence peddling from foreign sources. Sound familiar? Indeed, Biden defenders immediately tried to use Carter to deflect criticism from the President by falsely claiming that he pardoned Billy. Grant Stern, an editor for the advocacy group Occupy Democrats, wrote: “Jimmy Carter pardoned his brother Billy Carter who took over $200,000 from Libya as its foreign agent. George H.W. Bush pardoned his son Neil Bush for his role in the S&L scandals of the 1980s. Nobody thinks those pardons defined either presidency. Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden won’t either.”

Neither of those pardons “defined either presidency” because neither pardons existed. (ABC The View co-host Ana Navarro even claimed various family pardons as including another president to defend the Hunter Biden pardon: “Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts…But tell me again how Joe Biden ‘is setting precedent’?” Many immediately told her instead how Wilson did not have a brother-in-law named “Hunter deButts,” let alone pardon him). In reality, despite lingering questions and investigations, Carter refused to pardon his brother. Instead, he told the American people the truth:

“I am deeply concerned that Billy has received funds from Libya and that he may be under obligation to Libya. These facts will govern my relationship with Billy as long as I am president. Billy has had no influence on U.S. policy or actions concerning Libya in the past, and he will have no influence in the future.” Unlike Carter, President Biden lied repeatedly to the voters in denying that (1) Hunter had any dealings with the Chinese, (2) he ever met his son’s clients, (3) he knew of any of these dealings, and (4) he would ever pardon his son. He then pardoned Hunter for any and all crimes committed over the last decade, including potential crimes that many believe implicate the President himself in a multimillion dollar influence-peddling scheme.

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The thinking is: Better Johnson than another battle like the one that made him speaker.

• Trump Endorses Mike Johnson For House Speaker (RT)

President-elect Donald Trump has endorsed House Speaker Mike Johnson for another term amid disagreements among Republicans over recent spending legislation. Trump expressed support for the candidacy on Monday on his Truth Social network, stating, “Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man… Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement.” Johnson responded by thanking Trump, saying “The American people demand and deserve that we waste no time. Let’s get to work!” The endorsement follows a contentious government funding debate that nearly led to a pre-Christmas shutdown. Johnson, who became Speaker last October, faced criticism from some Republicans for his handling of the bipartisan spending bill.

It failed to pass without significant Democratic support and did not include Trump’s provision to raise the debt limit. It also faced criticism from GOP members for not including significant spending cuts. Some more conservative lawmakers who were opposed to raising the government’s borrowing limit broke from Trump’s directive to back the plan. Meanwhile, Democrats argued that the new bill would fund significant tax cuts for the wealthy, disproportionately burdening working people. The House is scheduled to vote on the Speaker position on January 3. Johnson’s re-election requires near-unanimous support from the Republican majority. Congress cannot conduct any business, including certifying Trump’s electoral victory, until one is chosen. Some GOP members, including Representative Thomas Massie, have expressed reservations about Johnson’s leadership, particularly concerning fiscal policies.

“I’m not persuaded by the ‘hurry up and elect him so we can certify the election on J6’ argument,” Massie said last week in a post to X (formerly Twitter). “A weak legislative branch, beholden to the swamp, will not be able to achieve the mandate voters gave Trump and Congress in November,” he added. The Democrats lost control of the Senate during November elections, with the GOP winning 53 of the 100 seats. Maintaining control of both houses of the legislature will be crucial for crafting legislation aimed at delivering Trump’s agenda on much-debated issues, such as immigration and the economy. Since February 2022, the US Congress has approved more than $174 billion to prop up Ukraine in its ongoing military conflict with Russia. Johnson became Speaker last October, after a group of House Republicans ousted his predecessor Kevin McCarthy, ostensibly because he’d made a secret deal with the White House to send billions in additional aid to Ukraine.

In September, Johnson objected to Vladimir Zelensky’s visit to an ammunition factory in Pennsylvania, calling it “a clearly partisan campaign event” that amounted to “election interference.” He wrote a letter to Zelensky demanding the immediate firing of Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, Oksana Markarova, for organizing the trip. In October Johnson told media he was increasingly against additional funding for Kiev and expressed hope it won’t be necessary if Trump wins the presidential election. “I don’t have an appetite for further Ukraine funding, and I hope it’s not necessary,” the Louisiana Republican told Punchbowl News. “If President Trump wins, I believe that he actually can bring that conflict to a close. I really do. I think he’ll call [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and tell him that this is enough.”

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Pick your friends..

• Deep State Freezes Over: John Brennan Praises Trump Transition Team (ZH)

If you had Obama-era Deep State operatives praising the man who the establishment has demonized as a “threat to democracy” on your bingo card, come on down to claim your prize. In what is sure to raise eyebrows across the political world, former CIA director John Brennan issued rare kind words for President-Elect Donald Trump’s second transition team, saying it has thus far operated in “more serious and professional fashion than in 2016. “I know that there is engagement between the Biden Department of State and the incoming Trump team,” Brennan told MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez over the weekend. “You want to make sure that the incoming team has as much intelligence and analysis as possible that’s available so that when they take over on day one that they are fully informed about what the situation is,” the former CIA chief added.

“I do think that there are some people in the Trump administration who are coming in and really are trying to do everything they can to be as prepared as possible on January 20th,” Brennan told MSNBC on Saturday. “You have people like Marco Rubio who has been named to be the next secretary of state, who is well steeped in these issues and also takes them very seriously,” he concluded. Brennan’s praise follows a long history of sharp attacks on Trump, who he recently referred to as unqualified to be president, citing his temperate and what he views as a lack of support for Ukraine against its ongoing war with Russia. “According to me, he was not qualified at the time, and he is not qualified today. We could see in particular that he did not understand the importance of the United States’s relations with our foreign allies and partners. He has little recognition for the transatlantic relationship, for NATO,” Brennan told RTBF.

“And that would give Vladimir Putin the green light to try to almost swallow up Ukraine,” Brennan said. “And unfortunately, I think it will encourage Putin to look hungrily toward the rest of Europe.” In 2018, Trump spawned fury and cheers from critics and supporters alike when he revoked Brennan’s security clearance. Trump, in a statement at the time, tied his decision to revoke the security clearance to the Russia investigation, “There’s no silence. If anything, I’m giving him a bigger voice,” Trump told reporters at the time. “Many people don’t even know who he is, and now he has a bigger voice. And that’s OK with me because I like taking on voices like that.”

The then-president also noted that he had received a “tremendous response” for the move. “Security clearances are very important to me, very important,” he stated, adding that he “never respected”the former CIA head. Trump also said Brennan had “recently leveraged his status … to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and on television, about this administration.” In a separate statement, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the decision was motivated by the “risk posed by [Brennan’s] erratic conduct and behavior.”

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“..members of Congress are entitled to immunity under the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution, which shields lawmakers from criminal liability related to their legislative duties. Cheney’s sycophants are already signaling that is the route she will take..”

• Liz Cheney’s Pending Immunity Whiplash (Julie Kelly)

Few people worked harder over the past few years to put Donald Trump behind bars than Liz Cheney, the former (alleged) Republican congresswoman from Wyoming. Seeking revenge for Trump’s longtime criticism of her father’s “weapons of mass destruction” lie, Cheney sought to settle a family score by imprisoning Trump over the events of January 6. “No one is above the law!,” Cheney, in her grating sanctimonious style, frequently insists. Well, except for her. It now appears Cheney is preparing to fight any federal and/or congressional probe into her demonstrably corrupt role as vice chairman of the January 6 Select Committee. Text messages obtained by Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga), chair of a House subcommittee looking into the J6 committee, prove that Cheney colluded behind the scenes with star witness Cassidy Hutchinson, who dramatically changed her testimony after connecting with Cheney.

The communications could represent witness tampering, subornation of perjury—every former White House official including the driver of the presidential vehicle on January 6 has refuted Hutchinson’s account of Trump’s behavior that day—and obstruction. Based on the results of his ongoing inquiry, Loudermilk determined that “numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney” and called for the FBI to investigate her. Cheney immediately responded by playing the victim and, of course, by blaming Donald Trump. But the American people appear uninterested in Cheney’s excuses; a new Rasmussen poll shows strong public support, including three-quarters of Republicans, for an FBI investigation into the bitter and defeated nepobaby.

If Trump’s Department of Justice decides to proceed, Cheney undoubtedly will seek immunity protections in an attempt to keep records away from federal investigators; members of Congress are entitled to immunity under the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution, which shields lawmakers from criminal liability related to their legislative duties. Cheney’s sycophants are already signaling that is the route she will take. During recent interviews, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a close pal of Cheney’s and fellow “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW” squawker, warned the clause can prevent the FBI from accessing her communications. Pressed by reporter Hugo Lowell during a recent podcast, Raskin pooh-poohed accusations that Cheney potentially broke the law. “That hardly is a crime in the United States,” Raskin said about Cheney’s secret collaboration with Hutchinson.

“In any event, she’s completely protected by the Speech and (sic) Debate Clause, which protects all of us in our legislative capacities both in terms of our direct legislative action and in doing the investigative research that needs to be done in order to legislate and to act as legislators in a comprehensive way.” Raskin said the same during a separate interview with CBS News. “They’ve been talking about going after Liz Cheney simply for doing her legislative work in a way that is completely covered by the Speech and (sic) Debate Clause. It is not a crime for someone to go out and find witnesses to a violent insurrection.” Now, that is really rich coming from Raskin and potentially from Cheney. As members of the J6 committee, both were instrumental in stripping privilege sought by Trump and his inner circle including his attorneys, which resulted in the production of presidential records to the Trump-hating partisans on the committee and testimony by White House officials who are usually protected by executive privilege.

But Cheney also urged the Supreme Court to act quickly in denying Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity from prosecution after Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in August 2023 on four counts for his alleged role in “conspiring” to overturn the results of the 2020 election, representing the first time in history a former president faced a criminal federal indictment. Despite the unprecedented nature of the question and troubling long term consequences for the country, Cheney acted as if the matter was a no brainer and accused anyone opposed as being, of course, a Kremlin stooge. A few days before the court held oral arguments in Trump v US, the landmark immunity case, Cheney published an op-ed in the New York Times urging justices to move with haste. “If delay prevents this Trump case from being tried this year, the public may never hear critical and historic (sic) evidence developed before the grand jury, and our system may never hold the man most responsible for Jan. 6 to account,” Cheney wrote on April 22, 2024.

She further lamented how Trump tried to “delay” proceedings before her House committee by seeking privilege protections in court. “I know how Mr. Trump’s delay tactics work. Our committee had to spend months litigating his privilege claims…before we could gain access to White House records.” (This is untrue since Joe Biden repeatedly and quickly denied Trump’s privilege requests and Judge Tanya Chutkan, who later presided over Smith’s J6 indictment, also expedited the matter ultimately forcing the national archives to turn over presidential material that usually takes years to litigate.) So, according to Cheney’s logic, any assertion of executive privilege—a legitimate legal argument with decades of recent case law behind it—represents a “delay tactic.” Should be fun to watch Cheney explain her hypocrisy once the privilege tables are turned.

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“I think Trump will acknowledge that Russia has achieved what it wants to achieve”..

• Trump Beat Harris, Could Bolster Russia-US Ties and May Hasten NATO’s End (Sp.)

With time already ticking for US President-elect entering office, the world is faced with a whole array of developments, such as military conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the rapid growth of BRICS and deep fissures within the Western bloc. The 2024 US presidential race came to a dramatic conclusion when Donald Trump convincingly upset Kamala Harris, a win that took place not least because Democrats “clearly had no policies that the American people wanted”, Michael Maloof, former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, tells Sputnik. When it comes to Democrats’ pre-election efforts, they “always wanted to make this more of an anti-Trump campaign as opposed to coming up with policies that would remedy the higher inflation, the open borders” as well as “the increase in crime and drugs,” Maloof said.

Harris “just spoke in terms of platitudes” as she “sounded more like a cheerleader rather than someone wanting to be president with definitive policies; […] she had no answers for the increasing difficulties,” according to the pundit. The ex-Pentagon analyst suggested that there will be more opportunity to try to resolve Russia-US problems that were in place under the Biden-Harris administration because Trump is more than willing to meet with Mr. Putin, just as Mr. Putin says he’s willing to meet Trump. Both are “very strong leaders” with “healthy respect” toward each other, and they would manage to reach “some accommodation” on pressing issues, especially on Ukraine. “I think Trump will acknowledge that Russia has achieved what it wants to achieve”, Maloof pointed out.

The pundit claimed that under Trump, “you’re going to see perhaps the demise of NATO altogether”. NATO’s four-year aid to Ukraine “actually crippled them [the alliance’s members] economically, and I think that this is the beginning of the end, not only of NATO as a so-called ‘defense’ alliance, but also the EU itself”, Maloof concluded.

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Russia will not budge.

• Lavrov: Russia’s ‘Not Satisfied’ With Trump’s Ukraine Proposals (Antiwar)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Sunday that Moscow was “not satisfied” with reported proposals being discussed by President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team to end the war in Ukraine. Recent media reports have said Trump’s team proposed the idea of Ukraine pledging not to join NATO for at least 20 years as part of a potential peace deal. Another report said Trump wants European troops to deploy to Ukraine to monitor a future ceasefire. “Judging by numerous leaks and Donald Trump’s own interview with Time magazine on December 12, he is talking about ‘freezing’ hostilities along the line of engagement and transferring further responsibility for confronting Russia to the Europeans,” Lavrov said, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

“We are certainly not satisfied with the proposals made by representatives of the president-elect’s team to postpone Ukraine’s membership in NATO for 20 years and to deploy a peacekeeping contingent of ‘UK and European forces’ in Ukraine,” Lavrov added. Trump campaigned on ending the proxy war in Ukraine, but it’s still unclear how he intends to do that. The Financial Times recently reported that Trump assured NATO countries that US military aid would continue to flow to Ukraine after his inauguration.

“In a boost for allies deeply concerned over their ability to support and protect Ukraine without Washington’s backing, Trump now intends to maintain US military supplies to Kyiv after his inauguration,” FT reported. Lavrov said that Russia has not received any official offers from the US and noted that official US policy is still being steered by the Biden administration. “Until January 20 — the date of inauguration — Donald Trump has the status of ‘president-elect,’ and all policy on all fronts is determined by the incumbent president and his administration,” he said.

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Test case.

• Musk To Provide Cellphone Coverage To Ukraine From Space (RT)

Ukraine’s largest mobile operator, Kyivstar, has signed a contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink to introduce satellite-powered cellular service, Kyivstar’s parent company, VEON Group, stated on Monday. The service, set to launch in the fourth quarter of 2025, will initially support SMS and over-the-top (OTT) messaging before expanding to voice and data functionalities in later stages. VEON described the agreement as a “game-changing” development to bolster connectivity in Ukraine amid frequent blackouts caused by Russian airstrikes targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure. The financial details of the agreement have not been made public. Ukraine will be among the first countries to adopt Starlink’s direct-to-cell services, according to Reuters. ”With access to Starlink direct-to-cell technology, Kyivstar customers will benefit from satellite-powered connectivity even when the terrestrial network is unable to service an area,” VEON Group stressed.

Starlink, which is a unit of SpaceX, put its first satellites enabling direct-to-cell service into orbit this January. Last month, the US Federal Communications Commission granted Musk’s firm approval to provide coverage to mobile phones in areas out of reach of land-based networks in partnership with T-Mobile. The government of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky considered Musk among its backers early in the conflict with Russia, when SpaceX donated $80 million worth of Starlink satellite internet terminals to Ukraine. Kiev’s forces have relied heavily on the system for communications. However, the billionaire was involved in a spat with Ukrainian officials and social media users in October 2022 after he proposed a plan to settle the conflict. Musk suggested that Russia should “redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision,” while Ukraine would commit to neutrality and drop its claim to Crimea.

Four former Ukrainian regions voted to join Russia in the fall of 2022, while Crimea held a similar referendum in 2014 after a Western-backed coup in Kiev. Zelensky reacted to the idea by launching a social media poll, asking followers “which Elon Musk” they “like more” – the one “who supports Ukraine” or the one “who supports Russia.” Additionally, Andrey Melnik, Ukraine’s former ambassador to Germany, went a step further by telling the billionaire to “f**k off.” A few days later, reports surfaced that the Ukrainian military began experiencing issues with Starlink services. Since then, Musk has repeatedly mocked Zelensky in his posts on X over the Ukrainian leader’s demands for more Western aid and for Kiev to be accepted into NATO. Earlier this year, SpaceX and Tesla CEO insisted that there is “no way in hell” that Russia will suffer defeat in its conflict with Ukraine.

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He’s their ideal scapegoat.

• Can Elon Musk Actually ‘Influence’ The German Election? (RMX)

Following Elon Musk’s guest column in Welt am Sontag, there is a huge outpouring of anger from the establishment parties and press over his endorsement of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, including claims that Musk is participating in “election interference” and harming Germany democracy. However, can Musk actually shift the election result, and if the AfD scores a surprisingly good result, how will Germany’s power elite react? Just to get the first point out of the way, it is unlikely that Musk’s endorsement will move the needle all that much. Musk is already demonized across the EU for his takeover of X and shift towards supporting right-leaning candidates. In Germany, there is a constant stream of anti-Musk content produced on a daily basis. Musk writing an op-ed in Welt is hardly going to convince the majority of Germans, who likely already have an unfavorable opinion of Musk.

The AfD is already polling at 19 percent or so, and a poll in November set the party’s voter potential at 25 percent, which means there is a definite ceiling to the party’s support. Could Musk raise that ceiling? As Bild writes, Hermann Binkert from the opinion research institute INSA stated that “Elon Musk’s support for the AfD can help the party with a view to the federal election. Musk enjoys sympathy in Germany… A party that covers a broader spectrum increases its voter potential.” The Bild report also notes that in “In liberal-conservative circles, the successful entrepreneur’s praise could help to normalize the AfD as a party.” There may be some truth to this, but again, Musk’s endorsement can only go so far in Germany,. Musk also supports Donald Trump, but the vast majority of Germans still disapprove of Trump.

The outcome of the election will be made clear on Feb. 23, but if anything, the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg is more likely to shift more people towards the AfD than Musk’s opinion piece. On the high end of the scale, the AfD can expect a result in the range of 23 percent of the vote, but that would be a huge jump from where they currently stand. In all reality, the next upcoming government is likely to be CDU and the Greens or CDU and the SPD ruling once again, but a stronger AfD result could complicate any potential coalition agreement. SPD General Secretary Matthias Miersch told Handelsblatt: “The fact that the Springer publishing house is even offering Elon Musk an official platform to advertise for the AfD is shameful and dangerous.” He said the process shows “how far right-wing networks have now advanced.” Now, the Bavarian SPD parliamentary group has announced it will leave X.

There is plenty of outrage all around, with Teresa Stiens of Handelblatt writing that the Welt am Sonntag allowed itself to be “harnessed to the anti-democratic cart.” Former editor-in-chief of the ARD capital studio Ulrich Deppendorf wrote on X: “Musk’s appeal in the Welt am Sonntag is the low point in the long-standing history of the Springer publishing house.” Konstantin von Notz, the deputy parliamentary group leader of the Greens, wrote on X: “Offering a Western oligarch like Musk a platform to promote these enemies of democracy and those who despise the rule of law is simply an amnesia.” All of this is pretty amazing considering the actual Welt article actively attacks Musk and his AfD support — all in the same piece that Musk wrote! Has there ever been such a ridiculous “guest column” before where the author is attacked in his own piece?

The reality is that foreign billionaires have injected themselves into elections all over the world, and while George Soros remains the classic bogeyman of the right, there are good reasons why he has earned his reputation. Not only has he funded political campaigns, NGOs, and influence operations across the world, but he has also written opinion columns — far more aggressive ones — than Musk’s own guest column. In fact, Soros has even written for Welt, which nobody seemed to have any problem with. Soros has notably waged war against right-wing governments in a variety of op-eds, including this one targeting the Hungarian and Polish governments, and he has been doing all of this for decades. Despite all of his “election interference,” he is hailed as a hero, and more importantly a source of money, for the European establishment.

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“The blob transformed the news into an engine for suppressing the facts or spinning them narratively when they could not be suppressed..”

• No, The Truth Is Not Just Another Story (Kunstler)

It must be obvious that the incoming government under Mr. Trump has one primary duty overall: sorting out truth from lies so the nation can reestablish a baseline reality to function upon. America is so punch-drunk from official lying that many intelligent people who ought to know better now proclaim that reality is unknowable, which is just a surrender to nihilism — the rejection of moral principle, a belief that the human project is meaningless. This awful condition has led to the point where you know for sure that “Joe Biden” cannot possibly discharge his duties as chief executive, and yet nobody cares enough to investigate who is running things behind the front he puts up. That would generally be the job of the news media, which is supposed to function as the public’s auditor. Now, of course, you are persuaded that this was never really their job, that it was a sham, but that is just another lie.

The news was not flawless, but neither was it presented as nothing more than opinion. The news existed to register what happened day-to-day. It was not so much concerned with why things happened, which was much more difficult to establish, and usually reserved for the pages labeled “opinion,” so that you knew it was somebody’s conjecture. I know this because I worked as a newspaper reporter in the 1970s. I actually found out what was going on about this-and-that, wrote it up, and saw it in print hours later. The facts. Journalism had some simple rules for reporting the facts about anything — and it’s hilarious that anyone thought it required a graduate degree from some credentialing mill like the Columbia U. School of Journalism.

The news was often meddled-with by interested parties, government and business, but they did not completely overwhelm the ant-like labors of x-thousands of reporters in the field, and the stream of fact they circulated. Not all of it was subject to dispute, meddling, or opinion because it was self-evident: Joe Blow got shot. . . a helicopter crashed in Ohio. . . a volcano erupted in Peru. . . . Only over time, the past thirty years especially, our government grew and grew and one of the things that grew out of it was the nefarious “blob” dedicated to protecting the self-enlarging perquisites and interests of that government. Blobs will absorb things they encounter, and in a predatory way, the US government blob absorbed the US news media. The blob transformed the news into an engine for suppressing the facts or spinning them narratively when they could not be suppressed, in order to maximize the advantage of the government and to protect the operations of the blob itself.

It is also a fact that this blob is aligned mostly with Democratic Party, because that party is most avid for the continuing growth of government, and its members overwhelmingly dominate in the officialdom that dwells inside the DC Beltway. The numbers speak for themselves on the DC voter rolls. So, a new government under Mr. Trump is feared cringingly by the news media. For one thing, the incoming government has tasked itself with reducing government substantially, eliminating many of its perquisites, and surgically excising the nefarious blob that is draining the purpose, meaning, and vitality out of our national life. The news media is terrified of being found-out for having acted as the blob’s chamberlain. We may find out exactly how that worked — how, for example, professional liars such as Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC were paid. What accounted for the amazing coordination of talking-points from day-to-day across all networks and newspapers?

We are about to find out how a whole lot of mystifying things have happened in recent years. For instance, those fantastic vote switcheroos in “Joe Biden’s” favor that occurred visibly right on TV in the wee hours of November 4, 2020? How did William Barr conceal the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop from Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys in the 2019 impeachment over a phone call to Ukraine? Who really has been making “presidential” decisions behind the false front of “Joe Biden?” Who in White House news reporters’ pool among the Cable News networks, The New York Times, and The Washington Post happened to know which officials were running the White House operation (did they not have sources)?

How did the FBI engineer the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and with how many agents and operatives on-site? Who was in charge of the DNC pipe bomb caper? How has George and Alex Soros’s network of money-dispensing NGOs been allowed to buy law enforcement offices all over country? How did Merrick Garland’s errand boys get to New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County DA Fani Willis? What has been done with the billions of dollars sent to Ukraine? Why is the CDC still advertising and promoting mRNA Covid vaccines that they must know have killed and disabled millions of people? Who thought it was a good idea to fill the ranks of the US military with transexuals? How did the order to throw the US-Mexican border wide open move through the chain-of-command, exactly? Things like that.

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“..the Ukrainian leader “has genuinely pulled off one of the greatest money heists of all time.”

• Zelensky Is ‘All-time Champion’ of US-Aid Heist – Musk (RT)

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has referred to Vladimir Zelensky as an “all-time champ” in a post on social platform X following US President Joe Biden’s announcement on Monday of a $2.5 billion US arms package for Kiev. Musk’s remark came in response to another X user’s comment saying that the Ukrainian leader “has genuinely pulled off one of the greatest money heists of all time.” President Biden’s latest military aid package for Ukraine includes advanced weaponry, ammunition, and armored vehicles, with a total value of $2.5 billion. Biden emphasized the need to support Ukraine in his final weeks in office, specifying that $1.25 billion of the package would be drawn from US stockpiles under the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA).

Utah Senator Mike Lee referred to the package as “money laundering,” in another X post on Sunday. There have been bipartisan calls for audits that have questioned the transparency and accountability of the $175 billion in US assistance since the Ukraine conflict began. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has repeatedly questioned the allocation and oversight of Western resources sent to Kiev. In March, Musk stated that Kiev should give Washington “proper accounting of how it is used and a plan to resolve the conflict.” He has also accused top US officials – most notably former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, known for her leading role in the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev – of “pushing this war.” While SpaceX has provided the Ukrainian military with Starlink internet terminals, Musk has long argued that Kiev cannot hope to defeat Russian forces on the battlefield and that the conflict must end in a negotiated settlement.

During the summer, Musk endorsed White House aspirant Donald Trump, who has vowed to bring a swift end to the fighting. After winning the presidential election Trump pitched Musk and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy to co-head the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body that will be tasked with reducing government waste and streamlining the federal bureaucracy. The billionaire has also reportedly engaged in direct communications with Zelensky in a phone call between the Ukrainian leader and Trump in November. According to Axios’ sources, Musk promised to continue supporting Ukraine through his Starlink satellites. Last month, Musk mocked Zelensky’s “amazing” sense of humor after the Ukrainian leader claimed in a radio interview that his country is “independent” and cannot be forced to the negotiating table by the US.

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Not so massive.

• Russia and Ukraine Conduct Massive POW Swap (RT)

Ukraine has freed 150 Russian soldiers from captivity as part of a major prisoner exchange, the Defense Ministry in Moscow said in a Telegram post on Monday. Kiev received an equal number of its troops as well, it added. The swap deal was mediated by the United Arab Emirates, the ministry stated. All of the freed Russian soldiers were initially transferred to Belarus, where they were provided with the necessary medical and psychological assistance and an opportunity to contact their relatives and loved ones, the statement said. The soldiers are now to be moved to Russia for further treatment and rehabilitation, the ministry added. It is the first such exchange since October, when the two sides exchanged 95 servicemen each. That swap deal was also mediated by the UAE. In November, Moscow and Kiev also exchanged the remains of fallen soldiers, with Ukraine receiving 563 bodies and Russia 37.

Later on Monday, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky confirmed the exchange, but claimed that almost 200 Ukrainians had been returned. “The return of our people from Russian captivity is always very good news for each of us. And today is one of those days: our team managed to return 189 Ukrainians home,” he wrote on Telegram. Moscow had previously accused Kiev of being reluctant to take back its soldiers from custody. In early December, Russian human rights ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova released a list of servicemen being held, whom she said the Ukrainian officials refused to consider for a prisoner exchange. “Zelensky does not need 630 Ukrainian citizens who were captured. He abandoned them,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova commented on the publication at that time.

In mid-December, the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban suggested mediating a major prisoner exchange between Moscow and Kiev that could involve some 700 soldiers from each side. He later stated that Ukraine had rejected his proposal. An aide to Vladimir Zelensky then called Orban “a meddlesome messenger” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, adding that “no one” who supposedly works for peace needs such people. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia was willing to accept Orban’s proposal and even contacted the Hungarian embassy with some relevant proposals of its own.

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“The IMF has warned that seizing these assets without robust legal frameworks could erode global trust in the Western financial system.”

• Kiev Announces US Gift of $15bn From Seized Russian Funds (RT)

The US will provide Kiev with $15 billion, leveraging future revenues from frozen Russian central bank assets, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmigal announced on Monday. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has previously said about Washington’s purported illegal transfer of Russian funds to Kiev that Moscow may challenge it in court. The American funding is part of a broader $20 billion contribution under the G7’s $50 billion loan framework to Ukraine. The agreement was signed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance and the World Bank under the PEACE in Ukraine initiative, Shmigal claimed, in a post on his Telegram channel. The G7, comprising the US, Canada, Japan, the UK, France, Germany, and Italy, initially pledged the $50 billion loan in June 2022, using profits from frozen Russian assets as collateral. Of the estimated $300 billion immobilized, $213 billion is held in the Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear.

Euroclear froze the assets of the Russian central bank in late February 2022, shortly after the EU imposed sanctions on Russia in response to the conflict escalation in Ukraine. The frozen funds have already generated billions in interest, with the clearinghouse transferring €1.55 billion ($1.63 billion) to Ukraine in July. Moscow has vehemently criticized the asset seizures. Last Wednesday Dmitry Peskov condemned the measures as theft and warned of legal retaliation. He was reacting to Shmigal’s announcement that the US had already transferred to Ukraine the first installment of the $1 billion from the frozen Moscow central bank funds. Last month, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said there are plans to mirror the West’s actions, using income from frozen Western assets in Russia.

“We have also frozen the resources of Western investors, Western financial market participants and companies. The income from these assets will also be used,” the official said. The decision to use frozen Russian assets has previously stirred debate among G7 nations. European members of the club such as Germany, France and Italy have raised concerns over financial market stability and about the legal implications of such actions. The IMF has warned that seizing these assets without robust legal frameworks could erode global trust in the Western financial system.

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“Our Ukrainian partners should not overlook the fact that Russian gas distributed through their territory brings high and significant revenues to Ukraine, which it greatly needs..”

• Fico Dismisses ‘Nonsense’ Accusations From Zelensky (RT)

Bratislava has strongly dismissed accusations from Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, who claimed that Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has opened a “second energy front” against Kiev and colluded with Moscow. The Slovak Foreign Ministry described the remarks as exaggerated and baseless. “We reject any nonsense about opening a second energy front, as baselessly fabricated” by Zelensky, as well as statements about “some invented alliance with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin,” the ministry stated on Sunday. The accusations were initially made by Zelensky in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday. He claimed Fico’s government was working to undermine Ukraine’s energy security “at the expense of the Slovak people’s interests.”

Fico had earlier warned that his country could cut electricity supplies to Ukraine if Kiev stops facilitating the transit of Russian gas across its territory to EU nations. Slovakia, whose economy heavily relies on Russian gas, receives its supplies through Ukraine via Soviet-era pipelines. Earlier this month, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmigal declared that from January 1, Kiev will cease transporting Russian gas and will exclusively utilize its pipeline system for delivering the fossil fuel from alternative suppliers. The existing contract with Moscow is set to expire on Tuesday and Ukraine has made it clear that it will not extend the agreement.

The Slovak Foreign Ministry emphasized on Sunday that Bratislava has prioritized energy cooperation with Kiev. “It was this current Slovak government that included the project to strengthen the connection of the energy transmission network as one of the priorities of the roadmap for Slovak-Ukrainian cooperation,” it stressed. The ministry noted that Slovak companies supply electricity to Ukraine on a commercial basis since they cannot be expected to finance the Ukrainian state. Additionally, it highlighted the humanitarian aid provided to Kiev since the escalation of its conflict with Moscow.

The Slovak ministry also pointed out Ukraine’s reliance on Russian gas transiting through its territory, which provides “significant income” for the government in Kiev. “Our Ukrainian partners should not overlook the fact that Russian gas distributed through their territory brings high and significant revenues to Ukraine, which it greatly needs,” the ministry stated. The ministry also criticized Zelensky’s alleged proposal during a European Council meeting to use Russian assets to “buy Slovakia’s consent” for Ukraine’s NATO membership, calling it “absurd” and warning against creating new conflicts. “We fully understand that Ukraine is exposed to a long-term war conflict but, precisely for this reason, they should not create new enemies and fabricate the emergence of some second front,” the statement added.

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“The country is reliant on Russia for around 85% of its gas demand, primarily through pipelines transiting Ukraine..”

• Slovak PM Fico Slams ‘Irrational’ EU (RT)

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has sent an open letter to European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urging immediate action to address Ukraine’s imminent halt of natural gas transit through its territory to the EU. A transit agreement between Russia and Ukraine is set to expire on December 31. Kiev has refused to extend it, citing the conflict with Moscow. In a letter posted on Facebook on Sunday, Fico accused Kiev of failing to consider the potential impact its decision will have on the EU economy. Brussels’ acceptance of the situation is “absolutely irrational and wrong,” he stressed. Gas transit through Ukraine accounts for only 3.5% of EU consumption, the letter states, citing an analysis carried out by Slovakia’s main gas supplier and trader, SPP. Despite the modest share, any halt would disrupt the market, raising gas prices by roughly 30%, the document claims.

Such a price spike would translate to an additional annual cost of € 40-50 billion for European households and infrastructure, Fico argued. “It is in the interest of all EU citizens that European efforts to support Ukraine should be carried out rationally, and not in the form of self-destructive and extremely damaging gestures,” the Slovak prime minister noted. Kiev’s decision will lead to “reciprocal measures,” he warned. Fico also said Russia “will easily place such a small volume of gas in other markets,” thus mitigating its losses. The situation requires urgent attention from EU institutions and member states to mitigate risks of supply shortages, he added.

Landlocked Slovakia’s position within Europe’s energy network makes it highly susceptible to disruptions in natural gas supply. The country is reliant on Russia for around 85% of its gas demand, primarily through pipelines transiting Ukraine. Fico has repeatedly voiced concerns regarding EU energy policy. He has consistently advocated for pragmatic approaches to energy security, often clashing with Brussels on its approach to the Ukraine conflict, namely the issue of military support to Kiev and the issue of economic sanctions against Russia. European Union leaders have repeatedly expressed confidence in the bloc’s ability to manage without Russian gas, accusing Moscow of using energy as a geopolitical weapon. The European Commission and Council have yet to issue formal responses to the Slovak leader’s letter.

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Incidents in South Korea with planes the whole world uses, lead to inspections only in South Korea? Explain please.

• South Korea To Inspect Boeing Fleet After Plane Crash Disaster (RT)

South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport is set to conduct a special inspection of all Boeing 737-800 jets operated by the country’s air carriers, Yonhap news agency reported on Monday. Yesterday, a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800, which was carrying 181 people from Bangkok, belly-landed, skidded off the end of the runway, and exploded after slamming into a wall at Muan International Airport, some 290km southwest of Seoul. The cause of the tragedy that claimed the lives of 179 people is currently under investigation, with preliminary findings pointing to a landing gear malfunction. Two crew members survived and are being treated for injuries. Boeing 737-800s are mostly operated by low-cost domestic airlines. Jeju Air currently has 39 of the planes in its fleet, while 62 are operated by T’way Air, Jin Air, Eastar Jet, Air Incheon, and Korean Air.

On Monday, local media reported that another Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air had returned to an airport in South Korea shortly after departure due to the same landing gear issue. Earlier, South Korea’s acting President Choi Sang-mok ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operation system “to prevent recurrence of aircraft accidents.” “Even before the final results are out, we ask that officials transparently disclose the accident investigation process and promptly inform the bereaved families,” Choi said, explaining that the top priority was to identify the victims, support their families, and treat the two survivors. Local media outlets had previously reported that the authorities believed that the airliner had been hit by a flock of birds, which caused its landing gear to malfunction. However, aviation experts questioned this theory in an interview with Reuters.

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“When I was young men were raised to respect women. When a woman entered a room, the men stood. Doors were opened for women and their entrance proceeded the man’s. Car doors were opened for women who were helped in and out. At the dining table men stood until the women were seated.”

• The Disappearance of the Male Role (Paul Craig Roberts)

Over the course of my lifetime I have watched the role of men taken away. The role of the male as provider, defender, and disciplinarian is no more. It was destroyed by feminists. To clarify “feminist”: In the past when I have criticized feminists older women who had careers asked why I thought women shouldn’t have careers. Their idea is that a feminist is a woman who has a career. But women have always had careers as mothers, homemakers, grandmothers, school teachers, nurses, secretaries, writers, artists, musicians, scientists, and even spies such as Eve Gordon who made during World War II 112 parachute jumps into occupied Europe. Even in pre-feminist days, one of my aunts despite being married had a career outside the home. She enjoyed the discipline of getting to work on time, the interaction with other people, and meeting new ones.

By feminist I mean a person with an ideological agenda of obliterating the difference between men and women. When I was young men were raised to respect women. When a woman entered a room, the men stood. Doors were opened for women and their entrance proceeded the man’s. Car doors were opened for women who were helped in and out. At the dining table men stood until the women were seated. In those days men still wore hats. A gentleman passing a lady on the sidewalk was expected to tip his hat in respect. A man who struck a woman or used a four-letter word in a lady’s presence suffered a ruined reputation. Feminists derided the many ways in which respect was shown to women as “placing women on a pedestal.” Showing respect for women was somehow undervaluing them and treating them unequally. Feminists insisted on women being pulled down into the gutter with men.

Big brothers were taught to protect little sisters. It was little brother’s job to learn to protect himself, and fights on the school playground was part of the learning process. Today men are no longer taught to protect women. But it is a natural inclination in men. Studies have concluded that the introduction of women soldiers into conflict causes a loss of cohesion and focus, because men become distracted by concern for the women. Feminists were not happy until they destroyed men’s colleges, male leadership in politics, military, and business, men’s clubs and male organizations such as the Boy Scouts which was forced to take in girls. Even the military has been taken from men. How is there a band of brothers when the commander is female? Men have lost their role. They are no longer the provider. The wife might have, thanks to gender preferences in university admissions, employment, and promotion, the better job bringing in more income.

Studies conclude that boys suffer depression from loss of a role. Reportedly, the suicide rate of boys and young men has been rising. What the feminists have established is a new form of male deference to women. Males must stand aside and give up their role to women. Feminist were not content to only destroy men. They destroyed women also. The idea of a chaste woman was objectionable because it held women to a higher standard than men. Helen Gurley Brown, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, used the magazine to encourage women to be harlots. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s Cosmopolitan was a fixture in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. I often wondered what my mother and grandmothers would have thought of a woman’s magazine, the cover of which heralded articles titled “How to be unfaithful to your husband without being caught,” “how to find a sex partner when on vacation without your boy friend,” “how to manage multiple sex partners.”

Today young women support themselves with their porn sites. Women brag on social media about having had 150 sexual partners, sparking rivals to vow attaining higher levels of wantonness. Female school teachers get themselves pregnant by their under age students. Mothers have 12-year old daughters on birth control pills. School children are sexualized at an early age to get them ready for the legalization of pedophiles, now euphemized as “minor attracted persons.” I often refer to the United States as a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel, which is what we have become. It will be a big chore for Trump to rescue us from this predicament.

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Shell

 

 

2025 https://twitter.com/i/status/1873559764841742642

 

 

Rabbit https://twitter.com/i/status/1873750783319285941

 

 

 

 

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Dec 182024
 
 December 18, 2024  Posted by at 10:22 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  72 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Woman in an armchair (Olga) 1922

 

Trump Says He Wants To Talk To Putin (RT)
Trump Could End US-Supported Long-Range Strikes on Russia (Antiwar)
Assad’s Overthrow An ‘Unfriendly Takeover’ By Türkiye – Trump (RT)
Trump Threatens To Fire Federal Employees Working From Home (JTN)
Trump Sues Des Moines Register, Pollster For Brazen Election Interference (ZH)
House GOP Accuses Liz Cheney Of Tampering With J6 Witness (JTN)
The Danger of White Knight Pardons (Turley)
An Open Letter To Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (AmG)
Will Putin Fight or Surrender? (Paul Craig Roberts)
Finland Warns Against Peacekeepers In Ukraine (RT)
Slain Russian General Worked Fearlessly To Expose Western Crimes – Moscow (RT)
Which Western Politician Will Flee Their Sinking Ship Next? (Marsden)
Musk Accuses ‘Deep State Traitors’ Of Targeting Him (RT)
Boeing’s Failed Plea Deal: What Happens Next (ET)
World Gripped By Mental Health ‘Pandemic’ – FT (RT)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1868707860504625322

Trump Xi https://twitter.com/i/status/1868830594991636722

Kash https://twitter.com/i/status/1868831906881794387

Jennings https://twitter.com/i/status/1868863814256431386

Mike Benz

Tucker Sachs

 

 

 

 

“It’s a carnage that we haven’t seen since the Second World War,” he continued. “It’s got to be stopped. And I’m doing my best to stop [it].”

• Trump Says He Wants To Talk To Putin (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump has said that he will speak to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky in a bid to stop the “carnage” between Moscow and Kiev. During a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday, Trump refused to comment when asked whether he had spoken to Putin since he won last month’s presidential election. However, Trump said that he intends to do so. “We’ll be talking to President Putin and we’ll be talking to the representatives, Zelensky and representatives from Ukraine,” he said. “We’ve got to stop it. It’s carnage,” he added, referring to the almost three-year conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “It’s a carnage that we haven’t seen since the Second World War,” he continued. “It’s got to be stopped. And I’m doing my best to stop [it].”

Trump vowed on the campaign trail to end the conflict within a day of taking office, although he has since admitted that doing this may be “more difficult” than he previously thought. The incoming president met with Zelensky in Paris earlier this month, and said immediately after last month’s election that he will likely speak to Putin in the near future. Trump and his prospective cabinet officials have refused to comment on media reports claiming that they have been in contact with Moscow, while the Kremlin last month denied a report by the Washington Post suggesting that Trump reached out to Putin by phone immediately after the election. Putin has said that Trump’s statements on ending the conflict “deserve attention,” and that he is open to talks with the president-elect. “It wouldn’t be beneath me to call him myself,” the Russian president said at a meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi last month.

As Trump has not revealed any details on the kind of settlement he intends to propose to Putin and Zelensky, his plans have remained the subject of media speculation. Most American news outlets have predicted that Trump will push for the conflict to be frozen along the current line of contact, with Ukraine abandoning its aspirations of NATO membership in exchange for security guarantees from the West. Trump has explicitly said that the US will leave the enforcement of such a deal up to NATO’s European members. Moscow maintains that any settlement must begin with Ukraine ceasing military operations and acknowledging the “territorial reality” that it will never regain control of the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, as well as Crimea. In addition, the Kremlin insists that the goals of its military operation – which include Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarization, and denazification – will be achieved.

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“He should be prepared to make a deal. That’s all. Too many people being killed..”

• Trump Could End US-Supported Long-Range Strikes on Russia (Antiwar)

President-elect Donald Trump suggested at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday that he could reverse President Biden’s decision to support long-range missile strikes on Russian territory. Trump said it was a “big mistake” for the Biden administration to greenlight the escalation without asking him what he thought. When asked if he might reverse the decision, the president-elect said, “I might, yeah. I thought it was a very stupid thing to do.” The comments mark the second time in recent days that Trump expressed his concern over the long-range strikes that Ukraine has launched using US ATACMS missiles and British Storm Shadow missiles. In an interview with Time Magazine that was published last week, Trump said that he “vehemently” disagreed with Biden’s decision. The Kremlin noted Trump’s comments and said Russia agreed with the president-elect.

“The statement in itself is fully in harmony with our position. That is, our visions of reasons behind the escalation coincide. And, of course, we like that,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Biden signed off on long-range strikes in Russia despite Moscow making it clear the escalation would risk nuclear war. In response to the step, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally changed Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. At his press conference, Trump also said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should be ready to make a deal with Russia to end the war. “He should be prepared to make a deal. That’s all. Too many people being killed,” he said. Trump campaigned on ending the proxy war but hasn’t articulated how he will do that. When asked if he would pressure Ukraine to cede territory, Trump wouldn’t give a direct answer.

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“[Türkiye] wanted [Syria] for thousands of years, and he got it… Türkiye did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost..”

Again, Trump doesn’t want the killing.

• Assad’s Overthrow An ‘Unfriendly Takeover’ By Türkiye – Trump (RT)

Türkiye is behind the regime change in Syria, US President-elect Donald Trump claimed on Monday in his first press briefing since the November election. Trump called the overthrow of Bashar Assad and his government an “unfriendly takeover” by Ankara. The situation in Syria has changed drastically over the past two weeks after militants led by the Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) jihadist group launched an offensive against the country’s troops, taking over major cities, including the capital Damascus. After the collapse of the Syrian military, the armed opposition seized power, forcing President Assad to flee to Russia, where he was granted political asylum. “Those people that went in are controlled by Türkiye, and that’s OK,” Trump stated. He added that he considers Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “smart” and “very tough” guy for succeeding in the overthrow of the Syrian leadership.

“[Türkiye] wanted [Syria] for thousands of years, and he got it… Türkiye did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost,” Trump added. He also praised what he described as Türkiye’s “major military force” which “has not been worn out with war.” According to Trump, Türkiye will also play a significant role in Syria’s future. “Nobody knows what the final outcome is going to be in the region. Nobody knows who will rule in the final… Right now, Syria has a lot of indefinites, but I think Türkiye is going to hold the key to Syria,” the president-elect predicted. Türkiye shares its longest land border with Syria, over 900km, and had been a main backer of opposition groups aiming to topple Assad since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. Despite listing the jihadi HTS, which initiated the current unrest, as a terrorist organization, Ankara is thought to have significant influence over the group.

Türkiye also backs the Syrian National Army (SNA), which earlier this month launched its own offensive in the eastern part of the country, hoping to capitalize on the collapse of Syrian government forces. Days prior to Assad’s overthrow, Erdogan voiced support for the insurgency in Syria, urging the armed opposition to continue their march to Damascus. Since Assad’s ouster, Washington and Ankara, which both back various rebel groups in the region, have held talks on ways to stabilize the situation and counter the potential resurgence of Islamic State militants in Syria. At a meeting between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan last week, the two agreed to continue working together on preventing terror groups from abusing the current instability in the country and on bringing peace to the region, starting with efforts to establish an interim government.

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“Telework and remote work are tools that have helped the federal government increase productivity and efficiency..”

That’s the exact opposite of what DOGE says.

• Trump Threatens To Fire Federal Employees Working From Home (JTN)

President-elect Donald Trump blasted federal “work from home” policies Monday, calling them “ridiculous” and stirring up pushback from federal employee unions. “If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Trump told reporters during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago. The issue has been thrust to the forefront in part by the incoming Trump administration’s emphasis on government efficiency, spearheaded by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. But the issue has also gained national attention because Biden administration officials like outgoing Social Security Administrator Martin O’Malley negotiated a deal with union leaders to entrench the policies, keeping telework in place for his 42,000 employees until 2029.

Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, threatened legal action against the incoming Trump administration if the president-elect tries to upend previously bargained union deals that let federal employees work from home. “Collective bargaining agreements entered into by the federal government are binding and enforceable under the law,” Kelley said. “We trust the incoming administration will abide by their obligations to honor lawful union contracts. If they fail to do so, we will be prepared to enforce our rights.” According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, there are nearly 3 million federal employees. Kelley argued that the extent to which federal employees work from home has been exaggerated.

“Rumors of widespread federal telework and remote work are simply untrue,” Kelley said. “More than half of federal employees cannot telework at all because of the nature of their jobs, only ten percent of federal workers are remote, and those who have a hybrid arrangement spend over sixty percent of working hours in the office.” Critics have shot back saying that effectively means that 40% of federal work hours are remote. If you remove certain workers like post-office employees and maintenance workers from the equation, the percentage of federal remote work is much higher. In particular, workers in the federal agencies in and around Washington, D.C. have largely grown accustomed to at least partially working remote. Kelley argued the policies help the government recruit and keep “top talent.”

“Telework and remote work are tools that have helped the federal government increase productivity and efficiency, maintain continuity of operations, and increase disaster preparedness,” Kelley said in a statement Monday. “These policies also assist agencies across the government, including the Social Security Administration, in recruiting and retaining top talent.

Waiver https://twitter.com/i/status/1868832325548838914

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No way that was an honest mistake. Career over.

• Trump Sues Des Moines Register, Pollster For Brazen Election Interference (ZH)

On Monday afternoon, President-elect Donald Trump told reporters at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club in South Florida that his team was preparing to file a “major lawsuit” against the Des Moines Register and its top pollster, J. Ann Selzer for election interference and fraud over their final polling data in the days before the presidential election. Trump followed through on his word, as Fox News reports that his team filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and Selzer overnight in Polk County, Iowa, under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act and related provisions. The lawsuit seeks “accountability for brazen election interference committed by” the local paper and Selzer “in favor of now-defeated former Democrat candidate Kamala Harris through use of a leaked and manipulated Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer and S&C and published by DMR and Gannett in the Des Moines Register on Nov. 2, 2024.”

The lawsuit also targets Gannett, the parent company of the Des Moines Register, which owns USA Today and several other local papers across the US. “Contrary to reality and defying credulity, defendants’ Harris Poll was published three days before Election Day and purported to show Harris leading President Trump in Iowa by three points; President Trump ultimately won Iowa by over thirteen points,” the filing stated. Selzer was once considered the “gold standard” of polling, but after Trump swept the state by a 13-point margin, winning the actual vote 56-43%, she later acknowledged her poll was a “big miss” and suggested that it might have “actually energized [d] and activated [d] Republican voters who thought they would likely coast to victory,” according to our previous report. Following the public opinion polling blunder, Selzer wrote in a guest column in the Des Moines Register just a little more than a week after the election that her days advising the paper’s famed Iowa Poll was over, and she would be “transitioning to other ventures and opportunities.”

Selzer’s exit—and now her legal troubles with Trump’s team—reflects a broader shift: trust in mainstream polling has plummeted to historic lows. Those accused of waging an information war on the minds of the people are now being held accountable. “The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the lawsuit said, adding that “defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.” The era of misinformation and disinformation by the Democratic Party, propped up by fake news, fake polls, and a government-sponsored censorship complex (and billionaire-funded: Soros), has infuriated the American people. At the same time, prediction markets like Polymarket have emerged, which offer one of the best insights into electoral outcomes and signal a new tool in political forecasting.

The lawsuit noted that Selzer’s more than three-decade run in the industry has led to her retirement “in disgrace from polling less than two weeks after this embarrassing rout.” The lawyers argued that “left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies.” [..] The lawsuit Monday night comes days after far-left ABC News and its top anchor, George Stephanopoulos, reached a $15 million defamation suit with Trump. Trump also filed a lawsuit against far-left CBS News, demanding $10 billion in damages over “deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news” for the election interference surrounding Harris’ questionable interview in October.

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“Federal law criminalizes witness tampering of varying degrees, and subjects a defendant to as many as 20 years in prison..”

• House GOP Accuses Liz Cheney Of Tampering With J6 Witness (JTN)

The House Administration Oversight Subcommittee and its chairman Barry Loudermilk on Tuesday released an interim report on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, concluding the attack was preventable and also asking for an investigation into former Rep. Liz Cheney for criminally tampering with a witness during the Democrat-led congressional inquiry of the tragedy. “Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, the former Vice Chair of the January 6 Select Committee, and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the report released by the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee and its chairman Barry Loudermilk stated.”Evidence uncovered by the Subcommittee revealed that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge.,” it added.

“This secret communication with a witness is improper and likely violates 18 U.S.C. 1512. Such action is outside the due functioning of the legislative process and therefore not protected by the Speech and Debate clause.” Federal law criminalizes witness tampering of varying degrees, and subjects a defendant to as many as 20 years in prison.The report also took direct aim at former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Cheney’s star witness at the nationally televised hearings, alleging that Cheney encouraged false testimony about a handwritten document and noting her sensational claim that former President Donald Trump tried to commandeer his presidential limousine that day to take it to the Capitol was directly refuted by the Secret Service.Loudermilk’s report suggested Cheney also bore responsibility for Hutchinson’s testimony.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation must also investigate Representative Cheney for violating 18 U.S.C. 1622, which prohibits any person from procuring another person to commit perjury,” the report said. ”Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, Hutchinson committed perjury when she lied under oath to the Select Committee.”The report delivers a second bombshell, revealing Loudermilk’s team uncovered “evidence of collusion” between Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Democrats’ Jan. 6 committee led by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Cheney. When Smith released a trove of documents in October that were used in his filings in the Trump case, present in the batch was an unredacted transcript from one Jan. 6 Select Committee interview with a witness.

“Given that the Select Committee did not archive, or otherwise destroy this transcript, and that the White House refused to provide an unredacted version to the Subcommittee, the only remaining explanation is that Special Counsel Smith received the unredacted version from one of the two institutions which did not cooperate fully with the Subcommittee,” Loudermilk’s committee concluded.

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“Biden’s pardon list has replaced the usual Inauguration Ball lists as the “must-have” item this year..”

• The Danger of White Knight Pardons (Turley)

There are growing indications that President Joe Biden is about to fundamentally change the use of presidential pardons by granting “prospective” or “preemptive” pardons to political allies. Despite repeated denials of President-elect Donald Trump that he is seeking retaliation against opponents and his statements that he wants “success [to be] my revenge,” Democratic politicians and pundits have called for up to thousands of such pardons. While there is little threat of any viable prosecution of figures like the members of the January 6th Committee, the use of “White Knight pardons” offers obvious political benefits. After many liberals predicted the imminent collapse of democracy and that opponents would be rounded up in mass by the Trump Administration, they are now contemplating the nightmare that democracy might survive and that there will be no mass arrests.

The next best thing to a convenient collapse of democracy is a claim that Biden’s series of preemptive pardons averted it. It is enough to preserve the narrative in the face of a stable constitutional system . Indeed, Biden’s pardon list has replaced the usual Inauguration Ball lists as the “must-have” item this year. Pardon envy is sweeping over the Beltway as politicians and pundits push to be included on the list of presumptive Trump enemies.The political stunt will come at a cost. Preemptive pardons could become the norm as presidents pardon whole categories of allies and even themselves to foreclose federal prosecutions. It can quickly become the norm in what I recently wrote about as our “age of rage.” It will give presidents cover to wipe away any threat of prosecution for friends, donors, and associates. This can include self-pardons issued as implied condemnations of their political opponents.

It could easily become the final act of every president to pardon himself and all of the members of his Administration. We would then have an effective immunity rule for outgoing parties in American politics. Ironically, there is even less need for such preemptive pardons after the Supreme Court recognized that presidents are immune for many decisions made during their presidencies. Likewise, members have robust constitutional protections for their work under Article I, as do journalists and pundits under the Constitution’s First Amendment. We have gone over two centuries without such blanket immunity. In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss our periods of violent political strife and widespread arrests. Thomas Jefferson referred to John Adams’s Federalist government as “the reign of the witches.” Yet, even presidents in those poisonous times did not do what Joe Biden is now contemplating.

Moreover, presidential pardons have a checkered history, including presidents pardoning family members or political donors. Bill Clinton did both. Not surprisingly, Clinton last week attempted to add his own wife’s name to the sought-after Biden pardon list. He added, however, “I don’t think I should be giving public advice on the pardon power…It’s a very personal thing.” That is precisely the point. The power was not created to be used for “very personal things,” like pardoning your half-brother and a fugitive Democratic donor on your last day in office. Yet, despite that history, no president has seen fit to go as far as where Biden appears to be heading.

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“..as Big Tobacco began buying off the TV news more than 70 years ago, Big Pharma is doing that today..”

• An Open Letter To Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (AmG)

Dear Mr. Kennedy,

Of the many issues you will tackle as Secretary of Health and Human Services, we implore you to work with FCC Commissioner Brenden Carr and immediately put an end to pharmaceutical companies advertising prescription drugs on television. This should be one of your earliest moves in the Trump administration. Why is this so timely? The sheer amount of dollars being spent on TV advertising by “Big Pharma” should raise suspicion among those who care about accuracy in media and information being consumed by the public. It is an old trick for an industry to buy off the news media for favorable coverage. When evidence of the dangers of smoking cigarettes began to emerge in the 1950s, news organizations were reluctant to expose “Big Tobacco” because it was responsible for an abundance of media ad revenue. The same synergistic relationship exists today with “Big Pharma” and television news.

Similarly, as Big Tobacco began buying off the TV news more than 70 years ago, Big Pharma is doing that today. The incessant drumbeat of COVID boosters, RSV injections, and flu shot ads is run alongside news reporters covering up vaccine side effects, including increased cases of myocarditis, anaphylaxis, psychosis, and/or early death. Nowhere is this more evident than with Novo Nordisk A/S’s type 2 diabetes drug Ozempic. While this drug may offer benefits to the millions of Americans who suffer from type 2 diabetes (some surveys place the number of Americans afflicted with type 2 diabetes at nearly 10%, with more than 30% considered pre-diabetic), at what cost? If your insurance doesn’t cover Ozempic, your monthly cost will be nearly $1,000. And you will be “hooked” for life.

Concurrently, what about the shameless promotion of Ozempic as an aid for weight loss? Can you watch a program on the nightly news on one of the alphabet networks or cable news without seeing ads for Ozempic touting its benefits to lose weight? And what about the genre of late-night so-called comics like vax-shill Stephen Colbert? The late-night TV category is dying, with Colbert (CBS), Jimmy Fallon (NBC), and Jimmy Kimmel (ABC) suffering historic low ratings. If not propped up by “Big Pharma” ad dollars, will a ban on ads for prescription drugs be the final nail in their coffins? Let’s hope so, as all three ceased being funny years ago. We know you are already on the record as having intentions of outlawing Big Pharma ads for prescription drugs on television. Today, among high-income countries, only the U.S. and New Zealand allow for such advertising. Almost all other countries are fully knowledgeable of the conflict between ad dollars and news reporting.

The longer this obvious conflict persists, the more the public will be misled and lied to about the real dangers of prescription drugs and the intentions of Big Pharma to buy off the news media to hide these dangers. A ban on this type of advertising will go a long way toward keeping the news media honest—or perhaps putting the worst of them out of the misinformation business altogether. Among the many items on your agenda, once you take office, this is probably the easiest of them. Our broadcast news outlets operate under a license from the FCC and are obligated to serve the public interest at all times. Taking money from Big Pharma to cover up or lie about the potential damage the public will suffer through the use of their products cannot be tolerated any longer. We both applaud your passion to Make America Healthy Again. Count us in.

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PCR just keeps going. Little self-reflection.

• Will Putin Fight or Surrender? (Paul Craig Roberts)

In his meeting the other day with the Russian Defense Ministry Board, Putin discussed the accomplishments of the past year and measures needed to ensure Russia’s security from Washington’s aspirations for world dominance. “We see the US administration and the collective West relentlessly trying to preserve their dominance, pushing their rules on the global community and manipulating them as they see fit.” Washington, Putin said, is engaged “in an effort to weaken our country and inflict a strategic defeat.” That is true, but why is Putin helping Washington succeed? Putin complains about the growing instability and violence in the Middle East. Does he realize that he contributed to it by withdrawing Russia’s defense of Syria? Did Putin forget “seven countries in five years”? Did Putin forget “Greater Israel”? Did Putin forget Turkey’s ambition against the Kurds?

Putin complains about the West’s participation with Ukraine in the conflict with Russia. Why did Putin make this possible by dragging out a limited military operation for 3 years? How could Putin fail to understand that Washington would test the intervention waters step by step to see if there are any real red lines. The absence of red lines has reached the point of Washington and NATO firing missiles into Russia, and Putin, despite his warnings to the West, retaliates only against Ukraine. Indeed, Putin’s retaliations are measures that should have been conducted on the first day of Russia’s intervention in Donbas. Putin has prevented Russian military action that would have made it impossible for Kiev to continue the conflict. What purpose is served by dragging out the conflict? Certainly not the preservation of lives.

The Russian population is hurting not so much from the West’s sanctions as from Putin’s central bank director’s 21 percent interest rates. Sooner or later the population is going to blame the war for the economic deprivation, and support for a war without end will decline. The same central bank director left Russia’s central bank reserves where they could be stolen by Washington. I suspect the central bank director’s warnings that Russia cannot afford war is the reason the Russian military remains too small for effective deployment, thus forcing Russian reliance on nuclear weapons. The West has just imposed more sanctions on Russia, and Russia continues to supply energy to Poland and Romania, NATO members hosting US missile bases on their borders with Russia. It is extraordinary how the Russian government helps Russia’s enemies to work against Russia.

It is not only Putin who seems unable to get his mind around reality. The leader of the terrorist group HTS used by Turkey, Washington, and Israel fo overthrow Assad, Hayat Tahrir al-Sharaa, complains that Israel has no excuse for continuing military strikes on Syria. Apparently, al-Sharaa has never heard of “Greater Israel.” Israel is clearing the way for Syria’s absorption into “Greater Israel,” just as Turkey intends the absorption of the Kurdish area of Syria to become incorporated into Turkey. As Israeli strategist Oded Yinon wrote, the Muslim world is too disunited to stand as an obstacle to “Greater Israel.” Perhaps that is the reason Putin abandoned his ally. But by sacrificing Syria Putin has left the road open to Iran and Lebanon. If Iran becomes the mess that Washington has created elsewhere in the Muslim world, the Russian Federation will be open to infiltration by jihadists to cause disruption in Russia’s Muslim areas.

Meanwhile Washington continues to operate against Russia in the former Russian provinces of Georgia and Armenia. How long before there are American missile bases in Georgia and Armenia? It is unclear why US missile bases on Russia’s border with Ukraine are a reason for Russian military action, but not US missile bases on Russia’s borders with Poland and Romania. It was impossible for Putin to stand aside while the US created a Ukrainian army to destroy the Russian populations of Donbas. The world should appreciate that Putin has not attacked Russia’s tormenters outside of Ukraine. Putin has also accepted sanctions without adequate response. The question is whether Putin’s determination to avoid a larger war presents as weakness and indecision that encourages the West to further provocations that eventually lead to a wider war. The big question in the coming year is whether Putin surrenders or fights.

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“Peacekeeping missions are based on international law and require a peace settlement and a UN mandate..”

EU wants EU peacekeepers. But they’re a party to the war. Of course they deny that, but…

• Finland Warns Against Peacekeepers In Ukraine (RT)

EU countries should avoid making hasty decisions about sending a peacekeeping mission to Ukraine, Finnish President Alexander Stubb has warned. He was speaking at a defense cooperation summit in Tallinn, where the conflict between Moscow and Kiev was top of the agenda.Some EU leaders have previously floated the idea of a possible peacekeeping operation in Ukraine after peace with Russia is eventually achieved. According to Stubb, however, a peacekeeping operation is not currently a realistic option, as it could result in an escalation, and it would also require hundreds of thousands of troops. “We should not get ahead of ourselves,” Stubb warned before the start of the discussions on Tuesday, as quoted by Finnish news outlet Yle. Peacekeeping missions are based on international law and require a peace settlement and a UN mandate, he noted.

“The operation cannot be launched on a shaky foundation,” he added. According to the Finnish president, a peacekeeping mission would require at least 150,000 soldiers. “In rotation, that means three times that, or 450,000 peacekeepers per year. So perhaps this discussion has gone off the rails, so to speak,” he added. Stubb was speaking during a meeting of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF). The military group is made up of the Netherlands, Iceland, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The latter five nations share a border with Russia and have been among the most outspoken critics of Moscow and its military operation in Ukraine.Before the meeting, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur stated that “no option can be ruled out,” even before there is peace in Ukraine, according to Yle.

At an EU leaders’ summit on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron plans to raise the issue of deploying a UN peacekeeping mission to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire and peace deal, various media outlets reported last week. The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said earlier that the bloc was not considering sending peacekeepers to Ukraine as hostilities between Kiev and Moscow are far from over. Kremlin spokesman Dmitriy Peskov said on Monday that it was “premature” to discuss a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine because Kiev refuses to hold peace talks with Moscow.

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Are we sure Ukraine killed him? And not some NATO country? They seem to have had more reason.

• Slain Russian General Worked Fearlessly To Expose Western Crimes – Moscow (RT)

Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who was assassinated in Moscow on Tuesday, had for years systematically exposed Western crimes involving chemical weapons and did so fearlessly, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. Kirillov, the commander of the Russian Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces, was killed along with his aide by an explosion in southeastern Moscow in the early morning. A number of media outlets have since reported that the murder was carried out on the orders of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), which had labeled Kirillov as an “absolutely legitimate target” for assassination.

Writing on Kirillov’s passing, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova said that throughout his career he had repeatedly exposed the crimes of the “Anglo-Americans” such as “NATO provocations with chemical weapons in Syria, Britain’s manipulations with prohibited chemical substances and provocations in Salisbury and Amesbury, the deadly activities of American biolabs in Ukraine, and much more.” “He worked fearlessly. He did not hide behind people’s backs,” Zakharova wrote. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chairman of the national Security Council, also expressed his condolences to Kirillov’s colleagues, family, and friends, and stated that the attack in which he was killed was “the agony of the Bandera regime.”

“With its last strength, it is trying to justify its worthless existence before its Western masters, to prolong the war and death, to justify the catastrophic situation at the front. Realizing the inevitability of its military defeat, it is inflicting cowardly and vile blows in peaceful cities,” Medvedev said. State Duma Defense Committee chairman Andrey Kartapolov described Kirillov as a “worthy Russian general” and a “real officer,” stating that had done “a lot to bring the US to justice,” particularly with regards to Washington’s activities in setting up laboratories around the world, including in Ukraine.

“We caught them there, and Kirillov’s role in this is greater than anywhere else,” Kartapolov said. He added that Kirillov’s revelations have “caught too many people” and that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if figures outside of Kiev also had a hand in his assassination, including the son of US President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden. Kartapolov stressed that those who organized and carried out Kirillov’s murder will be found and punished, “whoever they are and wherever they are.” State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin also condemned Kirillov’s assassination, stating that it once again highlights “the criminal nature of the Kiev regime.” “It is a terrorist state headed by an illegitimate president – a Nazi. All those guilty must receive the punishment they deserve,” Volodin was quoted as saying by the Duma press service.

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Pick ’em off one by one.

• Which Western Politician Will Flee Their Sinking Ship Next? (Marsden)

I have a confession to make. I really suck at cooking. I have no idea what I’m doing in the kitchen. And my best efforts usually end with a trip to the ready-made meal section of the local grocery store. But that said, I know my limits. You won’t catch me trying to get a job at in Parisian fine dining, for example, or even at a local diner. But the people currently cooking up the Western establishment’s shared agenda? They’ll just burn down the whole kitchen, and then eject out. Or at least some of them will do the latter. Not nearly enough of them yet. But it seems to be a promising new trend in the absence of their inability to just stay out to begin with. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for a no-confidence vote against himself on Monday, officially asking the parliamentarians of the Bundestag whether they might wish to do him the honor of taking a foot to his arsch.

It’s basically a case of political suicide-by-cop. Scholz wanted them to put his current mandate out of its misery because he’s totally impotent, politically speaking. Why? Because the yellow light centrists of his traffic light coalition bailed on him and he no longer has the majority needed to ram things through parliament.All this came about because Scholz’s finance minister, Christian Lindner, from the centrist Free Democratic Party, decided back in November that he wasn’t interested in a career as a magician attempting to work miracles with Scholz’s spending priorities. Germany virtue-signaled itself right into economic devastation following along with EU sanctions to impress their girlfriend Vladimir Zelensky. Then Scholz told his finance minister to just lift his foot up off the debt brake a bit so he can go on another €15 billion ($15.7 billion) spending joyride for Ukraine.

And Lindner was like, nope, how about you just dust off some of those long-range Taurus missiles in the closet and give those to your girlfriend instead? Yeah, they’re dangerous, but they’re also just sitting there like an apartment exercise bike with laundry hanging off it, so it’s a win-win – well, except for that World War III risk. Scholz didn’t want to do that because it would mean babysitting Kiev so it didn’t start a third world war against Russia. It would also mean sending German troops to Ukraine so Zelensky could sit on their lap and pretend to drive the Tauruses. And it’s never the toddler who gets blamed for those accidents. So Scholz and Lindner had a falling out over a month ago that ultimately led to a breakup, with Lindner and his yellow light centrists walking away from Scholz’s coalition table like a teenaged clique in the school cafeteria.

German lawmakers welcomed the opportunity to kick Scholz in the lederhosen and out of the Biergarten. One down, one more to go. Because next up (probably) is Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, currently topping the polls ahead of an expected February election. He seems keen on giving Washington and Brussels even more power over German decision-making. Yeah, maybe Washington can advise Berlin on nail placement for its economic coffin, too? As if that’s really Germany’s big issue right now – that it wasn’t sycophantic enough under Scholz, with Merz saying how it was “embarrassing how Scholz acted in the European Union.” Scholz shrugged off Nord Stream being blown up, putting the German economy at the mercy of pricy American gas, and Merz doesn’t think Scholz was enough of a team player?

Scholz apparently just wanted to keep feeding more taxpayer cash into the German military industrial complex under the pretext of helping Ukraine, but doesn’t seem too keen on actual war. But Merz isn’t even capable of understanding how that grift works, apparently. Sounds promising.Meanwhile, across the pond in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, bailed right out of the job, just hours before she was set to deliver the latest budget statement. That’s always a good sign. Kind of like calling in sick before a big test that you know you’re about to fail. The $62 billion deficit that was set to be announced – $22 billion more than Freeland’s projected target – might have had something to do with it.

She says that she was pushed out first, though, writing in her resignation letter to Trudeau, “On Friday, you told me you no longer want me to serve as your Finance Minister and offered me another position in the cabinet.” Freeland says that she rejected “costly political gimmicks” like sales tax holidays and onetime cash handouts, presumably, which she herself had spent months relentlessly promoting. She makes it sound like she was a sudden voice of reason, and referred to “strenuous efforts this fall to manage our spending in ways that will give us the flexibility we will need to meet the serious challenges presented by the United States.”

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“I’m going to find out who’s making these accusations and nuke them.”

• Musk Accuses ‘Deep State Traitors’ Of Targeting Him (RT)

US federal agencies have initiated at least three reviews into whether Elon Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, complied with security reporting protocols designed to safeguard state secrets, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke with the New York Times. Elon Musk currently holds a top-secret security clearance at SpaceX, the highest level granted by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. This clearance allows him access to highly sensitive classified information, including advanced US military technology, but he is required to report details of his private life under the “continuous vetting” rules. The investigations were triggered by alleged repeated failures to report crucial details about Musk’s travel and other activities, including meetings with foreign leaders, the NYT reported on Tuesday.

SpaceX employees responsible for ensuring compliance have allegedly raised concerns about lax reporting practices within the company since at least 2021. But according to the publication, complaints reached a “tipping point” following Musk’s public support for President-elect Donald Trump and his growing potential “influence” in the upcoming US administration. ”Deep state traitors are coming after me, using their paid shills in legacy media. I prefer not to start fights, but I do end them…” Musk wrote on X on Tuesday, responding to the NYT allegations. The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General opened its review this year, while the Air Force and the Pentagon’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security began separate investigations last month, the NYT reported. The agencies have declined to officially confirm or deny the existence of these reviews and have not accused the South African billionaire of disclosing classified material.

Last month, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and a member of the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations, expressed concern about Musk’s potential to inadvertently disclose sensitive information. In a letter to the Pentagon Inspector General and the US Attorney General, Shaheen and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island cited an October article in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Musk had multiple conversations with Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin in 2022. The newspaper relied on anonymous sources, and provided no evidence to support the assertions. Musk has dismissed those claims, referring to the senators as “puppets” and questioning who was behind the letter. “Who actually wrote this and made those knuckleheads sign it?” he wrote on X at the time. ”There will be consequences for those who pushed foreign interference hoaxes,” he vowed last month, threatening to take action against officials and politicians making baseless accusations. “I’m going to find out who’s making these accusations and nuke them.”

The allegations of links between Musk and Russia echo similar accusations leveled against Donald Trump during his first term in office. Those widespread claims, fueled by media reports and inconclusive investigations, were used to undermine his presidency but were later found to be without basis. The Kremlin has also denied claims that Musk frequently communicated with Putin, calling the allegations another ingredient “tossed into” the US political struggles. Musk has actively supported the president-elect and has become an increasingly influential figure among his team. Trump appointed Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a new initiative tasked with reducing government waste and streamlining the federal bureaucracy.

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“..diversity and inclusion” trumps people’s lives.

• Boeing’s Failed Plea Deal: What Happens Next (ET)

Months after the Department of Justice (DOJ) offered Boeing a plea deal to avoid criminal fraud charges, a U.S. judge threw a curveball in the case, rejecting the deal after taking issue with a “diversity and inclusion” provision in selecting a monitor to supervise the company’s safety practices, along with how the court would participate in that process.The United States charged Boeing with fraud on Jan. 7, 2021, following the 2018 and 2019 737 MAX 8 crashes, which killed all 346 people onboard both flights. The DOJ accused the aerospace company of deliberately hiding its Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System software, which caused both planes to stall midair and fall to the ground, from Federal Aviation Administration regulators.To avoid criminal charges, the DOJ offered Boeing a deferred prosecution agreement: a criminal settlement that required the plane manufacturer to pay a total of $2.5 billion in damages, including a $243.6 million penalty and a $500 million fund to compensate families of the 737 Max crash victims.

Boeing had to remain in compliance for three years after the agreement was signed—which ended on Jan. 7. But, two days prior, a door panel ripped off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 flight midair, changing the company’s fortunes overnight and thrusting its safety practices back into public scrutiny. After the DOJ wrote in a May 14 court filing that Boeing had violated the criminal settlement, which the company denied, Boeing then pleaded guilty to defrauding the United States over the 737 MAX 8 crashes. The plea deal would have required Boeing to pay an additional $243.6 million fine, invest $455 million into safety and compliance programs, and submit to three years of independent monitoring over its safety and quality control. Now that U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor has rejected the deal, the aerospace giant faces several possible outcomes, aside from appealing the ruling, aviation and legal experts told The Epoch Times.

“[The DOJ] can sit down with Boeing and rework the plea deal so that the monitor selection process is more acceptable to the court. Or they can take Boeing to trial on the conspiracy charge,” Erin Applebaum, a partner at Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, which represents 34 families who lost loved ones on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, told The Epoch Times. “I have no doubt that the first option is what will happen. I fully expect that DOJ and Boeing will rewrite the plea so that its terms are more favorable to the court.” O’Connor wrote in a Dec. 5 order that he had concerns about a diversity and inclusion provision in Boeing’s plea deal with the DOJ. He targeted a single sentence in the plea agreement that referenced the DOJ’s diversity policy in selecting an independent monitor to monitor Boeing’s safety compliance practices.

“In a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency,” O’Connor wrote. “The parties’ DEI efforts only serve to undermine this confidence in the Government and Boeing’s ethics and anti-fraud efforts.” Shawn Pruchnicki, aviation safety expert and assistant professor at Ohio State University’s Center for Aviation Studies, said the monitor had an “amazingly important task” of supervising the company’s safety compliance practices. “I stand fully behind [diversity], but I think many of us in aerospace and certainly in aviation, just like we do on the flight deck … we want someone who is qualified, that can meet the same requirements that we get,” Pruchnicki told The Epoch Times.

Applebaum said she and the victims’ families are very appreciative of the court’s mandating that the DOJ and Boeing improve the monitor selection process. “Though there is still much work to be done, the imposition of a highly qualified monitor who will hold Boeing’s feet to the fire is a good first step towards strengthening aviation safety and ensuring that there are no more Boeing crashes,” she said. In rejecting the deal, O’Connor also criticized how the DOJ positioned the court in the monitor selection process. “At this point, the public interest requires the Court to step in,” he wrote in his order. “Marginalizing the Court in the selection and monitoring of the independent monitor as the plea agreement does undermines public confidence in Boeing’s probation, fails to promote respect for the law, and is therefore not in the public interest.”

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Social media.

• World Gripped By Mental Health ‘Pandemic’ – FT (RT)

A mental health crisis is unfolding in workplaces worldwide, with financial services emerging among the hardest-hit sectors, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing recent research. Burnout, depression, and anxiety are the main issues that significantly undermine productivity, economists, business leaders, and health advocates have warned. A survey by global consultancy firm Deloitte revealed that 17% of finance and insurance workers in the UK experience exhaustion, declining performance, and mental distancing, compared to a 12% average across all sectors. The report noted that the annual cost of poor mental health per employee in financial services amounts to £5,379, more than double that in any of the 14 other industries examined.

Startling statistics by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) show that around 12 billion work days are lost annually to depression and anxiety, costing the global economy an estimated $1 trillion each year. “The scale of the problem is hugely worrying, particularly among young people,” Kate Pickett, professor of epidemiology at York University, told the FT. “The increase has been so huge that there is something real going on,” she said, dismissing suggestions that the rise in reported cases is merely due to greater awareness.

Researchers from Deloitte said the wellbeing of young people is particularly alarming, with one in five UK children having a probable mental health disorder in 2023, compared to one in nine in 2017. Among the factors contributing to the global “mental health pandemic” are the cost-of-living crisis and the pervasive use of social media, according to the researchers. The decline in mental health was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, during which global depression cases surged by 25% between 2020 and 2021, according to the WHO. The organization said that mental health levels have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, with some individuals continuing to experience a “massive hangover from the pandemic.”

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Elon work

 

 

Andreessen

 

 

Eva

 

 

Betrayal

 

 

Squirrel

 

 

Baby elephant

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 142024
 


René Magritte The menaced assassin 1927

 

Trump Wants ‘Day One’ Ukraine Ceasefire – NBC (RT)
Christmas Ceasefire Still Possible – Orban (RT)
Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Pick Predicts End Of Conflict Within Months (RT)
Ukraine Vows ‘Zero Gas Transit’ To EU (RT)
Kremlin Reacts To Trump’s Stance On Long-Range Strikes Into Russia
Clintons Open to Preemptive Pardon as Deep State May Abandon Them (Sp.)
Modified Limited Hang-out (Kunstler)
Mounting Boeing Delays Suggest Trump Won’t Fly In New Air Force One (ZH)
Texas Lt Gov Patrick Wants To Buy Construction Materials Auctioned By DHS (JTN)
Turley Raises Concerns Over DOJ Hiding FBI Informants At Jan. 6 (HUSA)
NYC Mayor Eric Adams Stuns Lefty Reporters By Going Full MAGA (MN)
Jeff Bezos’ Amazon To Donate $1 Million To Trump (RT)
JD Vance Honors New York ‘Subway Vigilante’ (RT)
United Kingdom Upholds Ban on Puberty-Blocking Drugs for Minors (Turley)
Musk’s Charity Sent Most Money To His Own Entities – Bloomberg (RT)
Elon Musk: “Starbase Is Going To Be A City” In Texas (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Rogan 5050 https://twitter.com/i/status/1867335814134608151

Kash

Don Jr https://twitter.com/i/status/1867404091846275578

Vance

Elon

Pardon

 

 

 

 

The shooting stops on Jan 20 at the very latest, validating Trump’s promise. By then, peace negotiations will already have started.

• Trump Wants ‘Day One’ Ukraine Ceasefire – NBC (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump’s team has been working hard to broker a truce between Ukraine and Russia that could pave the way to peace talks, NBC reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Trump has repeatedly slammed the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict and claimed that it would have happened at all with him in charge at the White House. He campaigned on stopping the conflict even before inauguration, though that has proven to be a tall order. “Trump is really serious about wanting to get to a ceasefire on day one,” a source told NBC News. According to the outlet, Trump’s national security team has already held talks with the outgoing White House and the Kiev leadership.

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg met with Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff Andrey Yermak last week. Meanwhile, outgoing President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan has been in touch with his prospective successor Mike Waltz to share “relevant information,” according to NBC. However, they reportedly have not explored strategies for a ceasefire or ending the conflict. The discussions are meant to ensure Trump is not surprised by any of Biden’s actions before the January 20 inauguration, according to an unnamed senior administration official.

“The goal is for the world to understand there is a desire for the time of transition to be seen as a strong America, working for peace and stability around the world, until President-elect Trump is sworn in,” transition spokesman Brian Hughes has said. Trump’s aides “hold a range of views” on Ukraine and have not yet presented “a conceptual or specific peace plan” to Kiev, NBC reported, citing former US officials in touch with the Ukrainians and two sources in Kiev. These sources described the Trump team’s contacts with Zelensky and his aides as “constructive” and “positive.”

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“Orban intimates Russia agreed to Christmas ceasefire proposal..”

• Christmas Ceasefire Still Possible – Orban (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that there is still time to consider his proposal for a Christmas ceasefire and a major prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine. Speaking about the offer he made to Moscow and Kiev earlier this week in an interview with Kossuth Radio on Friday, Orban said “one side accepted it, the other rejected it.” Judging by comments coming from Ukraine, it is Kiev that is currently reluctant to support Budapest’s initiative. ”But there are still a few days until Christmas [December 25], and this may change,” he stressed. The Hungarian proposal is aimed at making sure that “no one should die, at least, on Christmas. If the parties can come to an agreement, there could be a ceasefire on Christmas – as was the case in the First World War,” the prime minister explained. “And if a large prisoner exchange could be agreed, then hundreds… of families could be made happy,” he added.

On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Orban had made such an offer to Russian President Vladimir Putin during their phone conversation on the previous day. Peskov did not say if Russia went along with the idea of having a truce during the holiday, but stressed that, in the hours following their phone call, Moscow provided a paper to the Hungarian embassy with its suggestions about how the prisoner exchange should happen. On Wednesday, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky belittled Orban’s diplomatic activities, claiming that the Hungarian leader was only trying to “boost personal image at the expense of unity” in the EU in terms of supporting Kiev. “There can be no discussions about the war that Russia wages against Ukraine without Ukraine,” he wrote on X. Shortly after that, an aide to Zelensky, Dmitry Litvin, denied that any contacts between Kiev and Budapest on a proposed Christmas ceasefire and prisoner swap took place at all.

According to Peskov, unlike Ukraine, Russia “fully supports Orban’s efforts aimed at finding a peaceful settlement and resolving humanitarian issues related to the exchange of prisoners.” “Russia has never refused peace talks and has repeatedly stated its readiness to resume them on the basis of the Istanbul agreements of 2022. We proceed from the assumption that consultations on establishing peace will continue,” the Kremlin spokesman said. Earlier this year, Vladimir Putin said that, during the talks in Türkiye’s largest city, Ukraine was willing to declare military neutrality, to limit its armed forces, and vow not to discriminate against ethnic Russians. In return, Moscow would have joined other leading powers in offering security guarantees to Kiev.

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“..the Ukraine conflict will be solved “within the next few months” because Trump is “the only person” who can and will do it.”

• Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Pick Predicts End Of Conflict Within Months (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump could solve the conflict between Moscow and Kiev “within the next few months,” retired US Army General Keith Kellogg, slated to become a special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, has suggested. Speaking to Fox News on Friday, Kellogg did not rule out the idea that Trump could potentially invite both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky to his presidential inauguration. “President Trump plays three-level chess, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he did something like that. Could he do it? Of course, he could do it. He could make such a bold move,” Kellogg said, adding that he really believes the Ukraine conflict will be solved “within the next few months” because Trump is “the only person” who can and will do it.

Nothing should be put “beyond the realm of possible” at the moment, Kellogg said, adding that “he wouldn’t be surprised” by any unexpected moves made by the next US president. During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged to end the conflict between Moscow and Kiev literally overnight, yet he has never provided any precise details on how exactly he plans to achieve such a result. Earlier this week, he said that resolving the Ukrainian crisis and the hostility in the Middle East were among his “big priorities.” He suggested, however, that achieving the latter was “less difficult” than the former.

Moscow has previously expressed skepticism about Trump’s repeated pledges to somehow settle the Ukrainian conflict, dismissing his promises as campaign talk. Shortly after he secured the election win, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the promises of resolving the conflict overnight were clearly “an exaggeration of sorts.” “If the new [US] administration seeks peace rather than a continuation of the conflict, it will be better than the previous one,” Peskov said at the time.

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“The bloc’s policies will result in further deindustrialization, increased volatility on the gas market, and may lead to a new gas price shock and supply disruptions..”

• Ukraine Vows ‘Zero Gas Transit’ To EU (RT)

Ukraine will stop the flow of Russian natural gas via its transit network on January 1, Energy Minister German Galushchenko has confirmed. A key gas transit agreement between Moscow and Kiev is due to expire on December 31, and the Ukrainian leadership has repeatedly warned that it has no plans to extend it. Several EU countries continue to rely on Russian gas, despite the sharp drop in supplies due to sanctions on Moscow and a push by Brussels to sever energy ties with Russia. Ukraine has made preparations to shut off the gas, Galushchenko told the German-Ukrainian Business Forum in Berlin on Wednesday. “Our position is completely open. We are preparing for zero transit from January 1. And we have been [preparing] for a long time. This year alone we conducted several stress tests for our gas system to see how it will function with zero transit,” Galushchenko said, as quoted by the Ukrinform news agency.

The transit agreement between Ukraine’s state energy firm Naftogaz and Russia’s energy giant Gazprom was signed in 2019. Naftogaz praised the deal at the time as ensuring security on the domestic gas market. It also revealed that Gazprom had paid nearly $3 billion for the transit service, thus ensuring that the Ukrainian system would operate without a loss over the following five years. Ukraine’s transit network is connected to the pipeline systems of Moldova, Romania, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. The EU still receives around 5% of its gas from Russia via Ukraine, according to the latest data. The Naftogaz transit system and the European arm of TurkStream are the only two remaining conduits for piped Russian gas to reach central and southern Europe.

The TurkStream gas pipeline runs from Russia to Türkiye via the Black Sea, and then continues to the border with EU member Greece. Russia has said it is ready to continue deliveries beyond 2024. Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller warned in October that the EU would be committing “energy suicide” by shunning Russian gas. The bloc’s policies will result in further deindustrialization, increased volatility on the gas market, and may lead to a new gas price shock and supply disruptions, Miller predicted. Similar concerns have been voiced by Hungary and Slovakia, the two EU nations most reliant on Russian gas. Budapest continues to receive more than a half of the gas it consumes from Russia under a 15-year contract signed with Gazprom in 2021. An increased reliance on TurkStream and replacing Russian gas with supplies from Azerbaijan for transit to the EU through Ukraine have been named as possible solutions.

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Peskov: “It is obvious that Trump understands what exactly is escalating the situation around the conflict..”

• Kremlin Reacts To Trump’s Stance On Long-Range Strikes Into Russia

US President-elect Donald Trump’s statement regarding Ukraine’s use of Western long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia is completely in line with Moscow’s stance on the matter, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. Peskov was commenting on Trump’s sharp criticism this week of President Joe Biden’s decision to allow Kiev to conduct long-range strikes on Russian territory with US-supplied missiles. “The statement itself completely coincides with our position,” Peskov told reporters. “In this case we have the same vision of the reasons for the escalation.” He added that Trump’s thinking on the matter “appeals” to Russia. “It is obvious that Trump understands what exactly is escalating the situation around the conflict,” he said.

At the same time, the Russian presidential spokesman warned against “jumping ahead of ourselves” and predicting the actions of the incoming US administration. “Let’s wait until the moment when the president-elect takes his post in the Oval Office,” he advised. In an interview with Time magazine, which named him the 2024 Person of the Year, Trump stated that he disagrees “very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia,” asking rhetorically: “Why are we doing that?” Trump said that missile strikes deep into Russia’s internationally recognized territory are “just escalating this war and making it worse,” and described such attacks as a “very big mistake.” The US president-elect’s comments came a day after the Russian Defense Ministry reported that Ukrainian forces had launched six US-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles towards an airfield in Rostov Region.

In response to Kiev’s attacks, Moscow hit a number of Ukraine’s key energy facilities overnight into Friday.Russia has repeatedly warned that long-range strikes using foreign-made weapons would escalate the conflict and be seen as NATO’s direct participation in the hostilities. In late November, Moscow used its new Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile system for the first time, striking the Yuzhmash military plant in the Ukrainian city of Dnepr. Russian President Vladimir Putin warned at the time that if Ukraine’s attacks deep inside Russia continue, Moscow reserves the right “to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow the use of their weapons against our facilities.

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“Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have outlived their usefulness to rich globalists..”

• Clintons Open to Preemptive Pardon as Deep State May Abandon Them (Sp.)

Former President Bill Clinton has indicated he is open to discussing a “pre-emptive pardon” for his wife, Hillary Clinton, with outgoing head of state Joe Biden, while maintaining that she has done nothing wrong. This development was anticipated, according to Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel, who tells Sputnik that Bill Clinton is also likely to seek a pardon for himself and his daughter. Ortel adds that the proposed pardon could cover a period starting much earlier than Hillary’s 2016 email scandal, which Bill Clinton mentioned on “The View” talk show. The alleged fraud and pay-to-play activities involving the Clinton Foundation were significant issues, according to Ortel, who has been investigating the charity for many years.

“As in the case of the first Biden family pardon, my view is that a federal pardon for the Clinton family will have to go back, perhaps, to 1992 and continue so long as ‘The Clinton Foundation’ and its affiliates may operate,” Ortel suggests. Earlier, Biden provided his son with an unusual blanket pardon covering all possible crimes between 2014 and 2024. The Clintons “have been insiders in a rigged political system at the federal level” since Bill’s first presidential campaign in 1992, Ortel claims. However, even a federal pre-emptive pardon from Biden “is likely to leave Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton vulnerable to state and foreign prosecutions, along with others,” the analyst believes. Bill Clinton’s readiness to discuss a pre-emptive pardon with President Joe Biden is likely influenced by FBI Director Christopher Wray’s decision to step down and Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel, according to Ortel.

Ortel suggests that Wray is part of the same cabal as former FBI Director James Comey, who allowed Hillary Clinton to escape consequences for her 2016 email scandal. In contrast, Patel has never been part of the D.C. “swamp” and played a key role in debunking the Trump-Russia collusion allegations, which, based on then-CIA Director John Brennan’s declassified memo, may have been fabricated by Hillary Clinton to divert attention from her email scandal. According to Ortel, the Department of Justice (DoJ), FBI, and IRS have long covered up the Clintons’ apparent felonies, despite many being evident. “When the FBI finally spoke with me in December 2018, they focused on my connections with Peter Smith, Jerry Corsi, and Roger Stone, claiming they lacked the scope to investigate why so many in the Obama and Bush administrations might be interested in covering up Clinton Foundation crimes,” Ortel says.

If Patel takes charge of the FBI, he is expected to overhaul the bureau and could investigate the Clintons earnestly, according to Ortel. Reports indicate that Hillary Clinton is on Patel’s “government gangsters” list. The globalist elites and much-discussed US “deep state” may no longer shield the Clintons, as they have outlived their usefulness, Ortel says. “Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have outlived their usefulness to rich globalists,” Ortel states. The election defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, along with the inability of the Clintons, Obamas, and Bidens to produce a more vibrant and popular presidential candidate, apparently exposed their political bankruptcy.

As a result, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who has long been considered an ally of the Democrats, dismissed the party’s gloom-and-doom warnings and openly signaled in October that a Donald Trump victory would be acceptable for Wall Street. “Should the Trump administration prioritize prosecuting charity crimes, starting with wealthy donors like Bill Gates and George Soros and wealthy ‘educational public charities,’ whistleblowers and the incoming administration could make America proud by [taking down] the Clinton family and many other charity grifters who, even today, seem arrogantly unrepentant and unbowed,” Ortel concludes.

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“.. a barrage of prosecutions against Mr. Trump himself, guaranteed to prevent him from ever running again, to bankrupt him, and to stuff him into prison for the rest of his natural life.”

• Modified Limited Hang-out (Kunstler)

For eight years — including the four when Mr. Trump as president — the FBI and DOJ worked tirelessly to run him out of office and make sure he could never return. The effort was prodigious and, astoundingly, it failed. It was launched initially to conceal the crimes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, especially their moneygrubbing in Russia around the Skolkovo project — Russia’s Silicon Valley — and the Uranium One scandal — which involved the sale of US nuclear assets to Russia’s state-owned Rosatom company. The Clinton’s problems became especially acute in the summer of 2016 when Hillary’s private (outside government) email server came to light with its thousands of potentially incriminating memos. Looked like trouble. The cure for that was to accuse candidate Trump of conniving with Russia, a sort of political homeopathy.

It began as a mere Hillary campaign prank — the Steele Dossier — but CIA Director John Brennan and Barack Obama dumped it in FBI Director James Comey’s lap, and asked him to run with it. Mr. Comey stupidly complied, and before long he marshaled the executive officers of the FBI into the massive hoax that became RussiaGate. The Mueller Investigation was intended to convert all that into a prosecutable Trump crime while covering up the FBI’s own crimes, but it proved a fiasco when the Mueller report issued in March, 2019, came up empty — to the horror of the Trump-deranged public. Inspector General Horowitz’s report on these FBI shenanigans came out in December of that year, finding little amiss besides some “errors” in FISA applications and FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith’s forgery of an email as to whether one Carter Page was ever a CIA asset. The big news media let it all slide.

Mr. Trump somehow survived, to the blob’s horror, and prepared to run for re-election. The 2020 election was a fantastic trip laid on the American public. Covid-19 allowed for drastic changes in voting rules. The Democratic Party managed in plain sight to maneuver the obviously senile Joe Biden to head their ticket, and an array of very conspicuous late-night frauds got him elected. On Jan 6, 2021, Republican legislators were poised to contest the results out of several swing states where the frauds occurred in the requisite Congressional certification ceremony. The law plainly allowed for such challenges. It could not be allowed to happen. Hence: the operations to interrupt the proceedings. The primary device would be the pipe bombs planted at the nearby DNC and RNC headquarters — terrorists on-the-loose!

The backup plan was to turn the large protest group gathered around the Capitol into a mob that would somehow provoke an evacuation of the building. Between the FBI’s assets (“confidential human sources”) planted in the crowd, plus the Capitol police firing rubber bullets and “flash-bangs” into them, and mysterious figures ushering-in protesters through unlocked security doors, the breach of the Capitol was accomplished and the lawmakers fled the building. Nancy Pelosi arranged for the national guard to not be called onto the scene to fortify the understaffed Capitol Police. She was thrilled at how well it worked (captured on film). And the pipe bomb caper was swept under the rug, despite a ton of evidence that indicated the person-of-interest on the scene was a federal contractor, his movements recorded in cell-phone records and closed-circuit cameras.

When the lawmakers returned late that night in a great fugue of histrionic consternation, the majority decided to dispense with those challenges to the vote in swing states. “Joe Biden” became president and the DOJ under new Attorney General Merrick Garland commenced a raft of vicious prosecutions against anyone and everyone present at the Capitol on Jan 6. The next step was to mount a barrage of prosecutions against Mr. Trump himself, guaranteed to prevent him from ever running again, to bankrupt him, and to stuff him into prison for the rest of his natural life.

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Should Elon start building planes?

• Mounting Boeing Delays Suggest Trump Won’t Fly In New Air Force One (ZH)

Aerospace giant Boeing warned earlier this year that supply chain snarls, persistent inflation, and workforce challenges have impacted the construction timeline of two new Air Force One presidential aircraft. A new report from the Wall Street Journal suggests that continued delays indicate President-elect Donald Trump will not get to fly in the new Boeing 747s during his second term, with the latest projections targeting 2029 or later. Trump is frustrated with the delays. Here’s more from WSJ: “Frustrated with the delays, Trump raised the project with Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg when the two men spoke by phone in November. As he prepares to return to the White House, Trump has repeatedly asked advisers about the status of Boeing’s work. Boeing used to be a great American company, he has told aides, according to people briefed on the discussions. What happened to them? Trump has asked.”

In 2018, during President-elect Trump’s first term, Boeing received a $3.9 billion contract to build two new 747-8 aircraft for use as Air Force One. The aircraft were supposed to be delivered by the end of this year. Ted Colbert, head of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, spoke with Fox Bussiness in July, revealing that supply chain, inflation, workforce, and other challenges in building the airplanes pushed out delivery timelines. “Our team is fighting through a very, very challenging program – two very complex airplanes,” Colbert said at the time, adding, “We’ve done a ton of investment in our workforce and training, efficiency, work on the factory floor.” In 2023, the Biden administration decided to reverse Trump’s decision to switch to a red, white, and blue scheme, from the current white with two shades of blue, a design that dates back to the Kennedy administration. “The delay is startling given that Boeing isn’t building the planes from scratch,” WSJ noted.

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“.. will bid on all of that wall and we will buy it in Texas and we will give it to Donald Trump.” “I got a billion dollars in my pocket to do it..”

• Texas Lt Gov Patrick Wants To Buy Construction Materials Auctioned By DHS (JTN)

Texas GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says he want to buy border-construction material being auctioned by the Department of Homeland and give it to President-elect Donald Trump. “Joe Biden is now hauling off the border wall that’s been lying down for years and he wants to auction it off starting at five dollars a piece,” Patrick told Fox News opinion-show host Laura Ingraham on Thursday. “Message to the White House right now: I will bid on all of that wall and we will buy it in Texas and we will give it to Donald Trump.”

Patrick also said he has the authority to spend Texas tax dollars that way. “I got a billion dollars in my pocket to do it,” he said. “I write the budget with [state] Sen. Joan Huffman. We have the money.” Border security was a top campaign issue for Trump this year, as it was when he first won the presidency in 2016. In Trump’s next term, he is expected to ramp up border security and perhaps conduct mass deportations and end birthright citizenship.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1867412563656683730

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“We’ve had cases in the past where the defense has argued that sources and agents have been extremely active in pushing people towards criminal conduct..”

• Turley Raises Concerns Over DOJ Hiding FBI Informants At Jan. 6 (HUSA)

Renowned legal scholar and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley sounded the alarm about the DOJ’s failure to disclose to Jan. 6 defendants that FBI informants were present in the U.S. Capitol that day in 2021, as detailed in a DOJ Inspector General report. In a Thursday interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum, Turley said the report raised “more questions than answers” about the FBI’s rumored role in inciting violence at the Capitol. The law professor specifically such information would have been critical to defendants of the Jan. 6 protests who fell victim to the Biden DOJ’s aggressive prosecutions. “In some ways, it raises more questions than answers. It does support Wray’s testimony that there were no undercover agents in the crowd,” Turley said, referring to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “I think that for others, there is going to be a lot of concern as to what the sources were doing there,” he said, as reported first by the Daily Caller.

DOJ Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz revealed that at least 26 FBI confidential human sources (CHSs) were present among the crowd protesting the contentious 2020 presidential election results. “Our review determined that none of these FBI CHSs was authorized by the FBI to enter the Capitol or a restricted area or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6,” Horowitz found. Of the 26 agents, only three were summoned to the U.S. Capitol that day, Turley noted, before highlighting that FBI informants had previously been accused of inciting crimes. “We’ve had cases in the past where the defense has argued that sources and agents have been extremely active in pushing people towards criminal conduct,” Turley said. “We saw those allegations raised in the Michigan case involving the governor there.”

The FBI’s potential role in inciting violence was highlighted in the “kidnapping” plot of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Two men indicted in the alleged plot were acquitted by a jury, while two others faced hung juries. The latter two were convicted in a retrial. Turley argued that Jan. 6 defense attorneys would have used the FBI informants’ presence during the protests if they had known about it. “I think that some defense attorneys may raise the question as [to] why they weren’t told, if they weren’t told about the confidential sources that might have been involved tangentially with their own cases, because usually defense counsel says we want to know what asset, what personnel the government had there. So there is going to be questions of that kind, that arise,” Turley said.

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“I’m going to answer a few questions and then I am leaving because it’s not going to matter what I respond to anyway, you have your preconceived thoughts already.”

• NYC Mayor Eric Adams Stuns Lefty Reporters By Going Full MAGA (MN)

New York City mayor Eric Adams continued his recent pivot away from the Democratic Party and toward the incoming administration by declaring in a press conference that he will not provide any sanctuary for criminal illegal aliens. Adams met with President Trump’s incoming border czar Tom Homan Thursday and made remarks afterwards to the press that stunned reporters into silence. “We’re not going to be a safe haven for those who commit repeated violent crimes against innocent migrants, immigrants and long-standing New Yorkers,” Adams said after the meeting.

He continued, “From what I heard from the incoming head of ICE is that we have the same desire to go after those who are committing violent acts, repeated violent acts among innocent New Yorkers and among migration asylum seekers.” “That’s what I heard from him. And I was pleased to hear that, because we share the same desire,” Adams urged. “I’ve said this before, and I’m surprised the way everyone is attempting to state this is a ‘new coming of Eric Adams…[New York City] can’t be a safe haven for violent individuals,” the mayor said. Adams also referred to the hundreds of thousands of missing children who have been trafficked over the border.

“We have 500,000 children who had sponsors in this country that we can’t find. We can’t find them. We can’t find them. We don’t know if they’re doing child labor. We don’t know if they’re doing sex crimes. We don’t know if they’re being exploited – 500,000 children. There’s a level of hypocrisy…” Adams said. Adams then slammed the media, stating “I’m going to answer a few questions and then I am leaving because it’s not going to matter what I respond to anyway, you have your preconceived thoughts already.” Last week, Adams vowed to work with Trump on mass deportations, outlining that he doesn’t care if he gets ‘cancelled’ by leftists for it.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1867318869960143185

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How original.

• Jeff Bezos’ Amazon To Donate $1 Million To Trump (RT)

The US online giant Amazon has confirmed it will donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund and stream the ceremony as well, in what has been widely interpreted as a peace offering by CEO Jeff Bezos. The Washington Post, owned by Bezos since 2013, has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics since his first term in the White House. “Bezos is donating through Amazon,” a source told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. The company has since confirmed this in a statement to CNN. In addition to the direct donation to the inaugural fund, Amazon’s Prime Video will stream Trump’s inauguration as an in-kind contribution valued at another $1 million. Bezos is also supposed to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida next week.

Bezos’ net worth has been estimated at almost $250 billion, so the amount of the donations is largely symbolic. The tech mogul began shifting away from overt support to the Democrats earlier this year, praising Trump’s “tremendous grace and courage under literal fire” after the July 13 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. He then vetoed the Post’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in October, causing no small consternation among staff and subscribers. Earlier this week, the Journal reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg would also contribute $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund. Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago last month and had dinner with the president-elect. Both gestures were seen as an attempt to atone for donating over $400 million to Democrats and to various institutions in majority-Democrat areas, and later banning the sitting president from Facebook and Instagram after the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

Donations to an inaugural committee are not subject to any contribution amount limitations, but need to be reported to the Federal Elections Commission as such. Earlier this month, at an event hosted by the New York Times, Bezos said he would try to talk Trump out of the idea that the legacy media is “the enemy of the people.” “What I’ve seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled,” Bezos said, suggesting that Trump might be amenable to persuasion. Meanwhile, SpaceX owner Elon Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s closest allies, first by buying Twitter in 2022 and ending most censorship on that platform, and later by openly endorsing Trump and donating an estimated $200 million to his re-election bid.

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What are the odds that Alvin Bragg will still have a job in the new year?

• JD Vance Honors New York ‘Subway Vigilante’ (RT)

US Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has invited Daniel Penny to be his personal guest at the upcoming Army-Navy football game in Washington, just days after a Manhattan jury cleared the former Marine of racially motivated murder charges. New York prosecutors had charged Penny, like Vance a former US Marine, with homicide over a May 2023 incident that ended in the death of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill black homeless man. Neely had entered a subway car shouting that “someone is going to die today,” before Penny and two of his friends subdued him. “Daniel’s a good guy, and New York’s mob district attorney tried to ruin his life for having a backbone. I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun. I appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage,” Vance posted on X on Friday.

Earlier reports quoted anonymous sources saying that Vance had invited Penny to the presidential suite at the Washington, DC stadium, where President-elect Donald Trump is also expected to attend. The Army-Navy Game is played by West Point cadets and Annapolis midshipmen and is one of the most enduring rivalries in US college football. Following the handing down of the verdict on Monday Vance declared on X that it was “a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.” Penny himself denied being a vigilante or having any racial animus towards Neely, arguing he was only trying to defend the other subway passengers amid a spate of violent attacks on the network around that time. He did not take the witness stand during the trial.

Charges against Penny became a hot-button issue in the US, with Republicans such as Trump and Vance accusing the Democrats ruling New York of wanting to criminalize the defense of self and others, while Democrats tried to present the incident as driven by racism and bigotry. During the trial, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office repeatedly referred to Penny only as “the white man” and claimed he had “choked” Neely, setting up comparisons to the 2020 death of George Floyd that triggered a wave of race riots across the US. Bragg also prosecuted Trump on questionable grounds for alleged “hush money” payments, securing a conviction that is currently in legal limbo due to the outcome of November’s presidential election and Supreme Court rulings about executive immunity.

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This we need to stop. Woke destroys lives.

• United Kingdom Upholds Ban on Puberty-Blocking Drugs for Minors (Turley)

In the aftermath of the contentious Supreme Court arguments in United States v. Skrmetti over state bans on puberty blockers and gender-altering surgeries, the United Kingdom reaffirmed that it finds the risks far outweigh the benefits of such treatments for minors under the currently available scientific evidence. The move by the liberal Labour Party stands in sharp contrast with the portrayal of the Biden Administration and the treatment of the subject by the liberal justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was widely criticized for analogizing puberty-blocking drugs to taking aspirin. It appears that doctors in the UK are not ready to tell minors to just “take two puberty blockers and call me in the morning.”

UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said last week, “Children’s health care must always be evidence-led. The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.” The decision follows the release of the Cass Review, which was raised by the conservative justices as contradicting the factual representations of the Biden Administration, even leading Justice Samuel Alito to suggest that Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the government might not have fulfilled their duty of candor to the tribunal. He noted that the Cass study found scant evidence that the benefits of transgender treatment are greater than the risks. He then delivered the haymaker: “I wonder if you would like to stand by the statement in your position or if you think it would now be appropriate to modify that and withdraw your statement.”

Streeting cited significant doubts about the benefits of puberty blockers while noting the “significant risks” to children. The government will allow puberty blockers to be administered to children in clinical trials. It is not clear if the Supreme Court will take “judicial notice” of the new decision, but it can. In fairness to Sotomayor, she was trying to argue that all treatments have risks in making her aspirin analogy. Yet, the comment was taken as trivializing the alleged harm and trauma raised by many in this debate. These studies clearly show greater risks than those associated with aspirin. However, what the Biden Administration was arguing (and the liberal justices were seemingly supporting) is that states would be barred by the Court from reaching the same conclusion as the UK and other countries. Indeed, Streeting echoed what the states argued to the Supreme Court that the government must “act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice.”

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“..the IRS mandates that all charitable foundations deploy, on average, at least 5% of their assets a year..”

“..saw his net worth surpass a record $440 billion this week..”

• Musk’s Charity Sent Most Money To His Own Entities – Bloomberg (RT)

Elon Musk’s charitable foundation has reportedly failed to give away the amount of money required by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), while also sending millions of dollars to other entities controlled by the billionaire, Bloomberg reported on Friday. According to the outlet, which has obtained the Musk Foundation’s latest tax filing, the organization grew to $9.5 billion in assets last year while handing out $237 million in gifts, most of which went to Musk’s other nonprofits, such as The Foundation, X Prize Foundation, and Fidelity Charitable. The New York Times has reported that the tax filings suggest that the Musk Foundation fell $421 million short of the amount it was required to give away in 2023, meaning that the billionaire now has until the end of the year to distribute that money or be required to pay a sizable penalty to the IRS.

As noted by Bloomberg, the IRS mandates that all charitable foundations deploy, on average, at least 5% of their assets a year. Musk, however, has apparently missed that bar on numerous occasions. The entrepreneur, who is estimated to be the richest person on the planet, saw his net worth surpass a record $440 billion this week after an insider share sale of his privately held SpaceX, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Musk’s new fortune puts him nearly $200 billion ahead of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. He is also now worth more on paper than most US public companies, including Costco, Home Depot, and Netflix, as per Business Insider. Meanwhile, the entrepreneur has emerged as one of the top Republican donors this year and has become one of the most prominent members of US President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle. Following the Republican’s election victory last month, Musk also pledged to audit the entire US government and cut government spending by up to $2 trillion as the head of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

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“SpaceX is why America is years ahead of the rest of the world in the space race. ..”

• Elon Musk: “Starbase Is Going To Be A City” In Texas (ZH)

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has sent a letter to local officials in southern Texas outlining a new mission: to transform the remote area where the company launches rockets into an incorporated town named “Starbase, Texas.” SpaceX launches rockets on the southern tip of Texas at Boca Chica Beach, near the Mexican border. Incorporating the remote area would “streamline the processes required to build the amenities necessary to make the area a world-class place to live—for the hundreds already calling it home, as well as for prospective workers eager to help build humanity’s future in space,” the company wrote in a letter to Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., the county’s top elected official.

“As you know, through agreements with the County, SpaceX currently performs several civil functions around Starbase due to its remote location, including management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents. Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body,” the letter said. AP News quoted Judge Treviño, who said there were incorporation talks in 2021. However, this was the first time a petition was officially filed. “Our legal and elections administration will review the petition, see whether or not it complied with all of the statutory requirements and then we’ll go from there,” the judge said. Earlier this year, the judge issued a local impact study finding that 3,400 full-time SpaceX employees and contractors work at the rocket launch site.

SpaceX’s rapid expansion comes as Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, told investors last month that Starship launches over the next four years could exceed 400. CNBC confirmed on Wednesday that the latest valuation for SpaceX hit $350 billion based on a secondary share sale. As previously noted, SpaceX launched 362 metric tons of upmass to space in the third quarter. In other words, Musk’s company launched 86% of the upmass in the world, beating all rocket programs, including ones funded by nation-states. Starship’s fifth test flight in early October was groundbreaking… SpaceX is why America is years ahead of the rest of the world in the space race.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1867486338645471488

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Dec 112024
 


Johannes Vermeer Woman holding a balance 1662-63

 

Pressure Mounts For Support Of Trump’s Cabinet Picks During Honeymoon (JTN)
250 Conservative Veterans Sign Letter Backing Tulsi Gabbard Nomination (Hill)
Pete Hegseth Lashes Out At Media ‘Smear’ Campaign (RT)
Pete Hegseth Will Be Confirmed As Secretary of Defense, Predicts His Lawyer (JTN)
DOJ Spied On Kash Patel, Staffers Without Telling Courts (JTN)
How Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Plans To Keep Trump Case Alive (ZH)
Giuliani Says Jury Verdict In Penny’s Case Is A Black Eye To Bragg (JTN)
Russia Close To Winning Ukraine Conflict – Spy Chief (RT)
Obstruction of Immigration Enforcement Could Prove Costly for Citizens (Turley)
Bernie Sanders Says Musk Is Right On Military Spending (JTN)
Boeing Reportedly Restarts 737 Max Production (ZH)
State Dep. Scrambles To Scuttle $100M Censorship Network Before Trump (ZH)
Putin-the-Unready Is Beginning to be Held Accountable (Paul Craig Roberts)
Elon Musk Jokes Bill Gates Could Go “Bankrupt” On Short Tesla Bet (ZH)
SCOTUS Asked to Block State From Probing Doctors Who Question COVID Policies (ET)
Western Conservatives Find Asylum In The Russian Federation (SCF)

 

 

 

 

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“..the first Democrat to join the House’s newly-formed DOGE caucus..”

• Pressure Mounts For Support Of Trump’s Cabinet Picks During Honeymoon (JTN)

President-elect Donald Trump seems to finally be enjoying the honeymoon period he didn’t get after his 2016 victory, with Democrats publicly expressing willingness to work with him on key initiatives and public polling showing broad approval of his plans. After winning the White House the first time, Trump didn’t experience the traditional polling bump and sense of public optimism that often comes with a new president. The post-2024 transition period, however, has been discernibly different. In a recent Rasmussen Reports survey, 55% of voters expressed the belief that Trump’s election win had given him a mandate to implement his agenda, while 32% disagreed and 13% were unsure. A separate Napolitan Institute survey, found that 53% approved of how Trump is handling the transition while 43% disapproved.

As he goes to war with some Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans over his Cabinet nominees, public support for his agenda seems to be giving him momentum to push through the controversial personnel picks who will implement it. Some Democrats, moreover, have expressed openness to specific nominees and interest in participating in some of his initiatives. The incoming commander-in-chief has repeatedly pointed to his landslide electoral victory that saw him carry both the Electoral College and the popular vote to support claims of a mandate for change. To that end, he has selected nominees for key departments with unconventional backgrounds and has rattled upper chamber lawmakers in doing so. The confirmation hearings won’t begin until January, but in the meantime, lawmakers face a pressure campaign from Trump supporters to get on board with his efforts.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., last week became the first Democrat to join the House’s newly-formed DOGE caucus, a group of lawmakers dedicated to trimming the size of the government and working with Trump’s planned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “I’ve been clear that there are ways we can reorganize our government to make it work better for the American people,” he said at the time. “The Caucus should look at the bureaucracy that the DHS has become and include recommendations to make Secret Service and FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] independent federal agencies with a direct report to the White House.” Potentially driving lawmakers like Moskowitz to get on board with the DOGE agenda is public polling data suggesting it enjoys broad support. The Napolitan survey also found that 52% of Americans approve of the way Trump is managing the transition.

Some of the specific proposals from DOGE co-leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, such as bringing federal employees back to the office, have majority support. Fifty-seven percent of Americans backed requiring federal employees to cease remote work, while just 28% opposed the move in the Napolitan survey. Fifty-three percent backed firing those who refused to work in-person. Another 60% supported moving some federal agencies out of the Washington, D.C., area. The public is, at best, cautiously optimistic about DOGE’s prospects, even if they support its efforts. Only 45% think the new department can “easily eliminate” trillions in waste. Forty-nine percent think eliminating waste fraud and abuse will balance the budget.

At least some of Trump’s cabinet picks seem to have picked up support from upper chamber Democrats, notably Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., whom he tapped for Secretary of State. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., had positive words for the Florida Republican, as did other lawmakers across the aisle. “Unsurprisingly, the other team’s pick will have political differences than my own,” Fetterman said. “That being said, my colleague [Rubio] is a strong choice and I look forward to voting for his confirmation.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., moreover, has also expressed interest in Rubio’s potential confirmation. “I look forward to talking to him. You know, Marco Rubio, you have strange bedfellows, and you have strange alliances,” she said.

Fetterman also expressed openness to Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Oz and Fetterman squared off for one of the Keystone State’s Senate seats in 2022. Fetterman insisted he doesn’t have “any kind of bitterness” toward Oz and was “open to dialogue” on the issues relevant to CMS. To be sure, Democrats haven’t signed up to back some of his more contentious nominees. Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, R, had to drop his bid for Attorney General in the face of intransigent Democrats and moderate Republicans who refused to support him.Now, Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth faces uncertain prospects as Democrats largely oppose him and some of the same Republicans concerned with Gaetz have not committed to his confirmation.

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“A warrior whose vote cannot be bought, and whose integrity cannot be folded,” the letter reads. “We are honored to call her one of our own.”

• 250 Conservative Veterans Sign Letter Backing Tulsi Gabbard Nomination (Hill)

More than 250 veterans have signed a letter supporting former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), President-elect Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence. The letter offers a fierce defense of Gabbard’s “lifelong devotion to service” and blasts critics who call into question her loyalty. “We are appalled by the baseless attacks questioning Tulsi’s loyalty to our great nation. For over 20 years and across multiple combat deployments, Tulsi has risked her life to defend the safety, security and freedom of the American people,” the letter reads. “These attacks insult not only her, but every one of us veterans who have served our country.” The support comes as Gabbard faces growing scrutiny for her past comments on Moscow and her 2017 visit with the former Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad.

Gabbard — who served in the House for eight years as a Democrat — has made remarks about the Russia-Ukraine war that were sympathetic to Moscow and echoed by Russian state news, which has praised her nomination. In the Middle East, Gabbard visited Syria in 2017 and said Assad was not an enemy of the U.S. — though she later labeled him a “brutal dictator.” The remarks have gained renewed attention in recent days, as the Syrian government collapsed and Assad was driven out of the country by rebels. The letter comes days after a group of nearly 100 former national security officials issued their own letter about Gabbard, urging the Senate to “carefully scrutinize” the former congresswoman. They raised concerns about her experience level, her past comments and meeting with Assad, and that she has “publicly cast doubt on U.S. intelligence reports.”

“Her sympathy for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Assad raises questions about her judgment and fitness,” the letter last week read. The veterans, in their letter Monday, push back against “so-called ‘experts’ in Washington” who have criticized Gabbard, saying their attacks are “baseless lies and smears.” “Unable and unwilling to challenge the substance of her views, her critics resort to baseless lies and smears, exposing the weakness of their arguments,” the letter reads. “Tulsi’s patriotism, shaped on the battlefield, mirrors the values and aspirations of the American people far more than the failed policies of so-called ‘experts’ in Washington, who have been part of the problem for too long.”

The veterans praise Trump in the letter for selecting Gabbard as the nominee, saying, “As Director of National Intelligence, she will be a fearless reformer and a true patriot, ensuring that the intelligence apparatus serves the American people and protects our Republic.” “We are deeply grateful to President Trump for appointing Tulsi Gabbard to this critical role and proud to stand beside her—a leader whose courage and convictions we know firsthand. A warrior whose vote cannot be bought, and whose integrity cannot be folded,” the letter reads. “We are honored to call her one of our own.” The letter was signed by former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, both of whom served for short periods of time in the first Trump administration. Reps. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) signed the letter, as did Rep.-elect Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.).

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“They take something, then add anonymous sources, and contortions, and flat-out lies and then they try to try you in the media..”

• Pete Hegseth Lashes Out At Media ‘Smear’ Campaign (RT)

Donald Trump’s nominee to be US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has accused the media of staging a libel-based show trial to prevent him from becoming the next Pentagon chief. The US president-elect’s naming of Hegseth has led to a series of negative news reports that have raised questions about his fitness for the job and likelihood of being confirmed by the Senate. Among the accusations leveled at the army veteran and television presenter are alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct. In 2017, then Fox News host Hegseth was accused of raping an unnamed woman after a Republican convention in California. Police investigated the claim and did not file any charges. It was reported recently that Hegseth paid the woman an undisclosed sum, and both parties signed a confidentiality agreement. In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Hegseth insisted that “the left” is trying to use the case to stage a show trial in the media.

”This is what the left does… It’s the anatomy of a smear. They take something, then add anonymous sources, and contortions, and flat-out lies and then they try to try you in the media before you can even get into the doors with senators,” he said.Hegseth went on to say that Trump urged him to “keep fighting” and “stand up for the change that needs to come to the Defense Department.” During his re-election campaign, Trump accused the Democrats of damaging America’s standing on the world stage and vowed to restore the country’s prestige under a “peace through strength” banner.Under the US constitution, presidential appointments to significant offices must be confirmed by the upper chamber of the US Congress, the Senate. Historically, the Senate has confirmed most nominations, with only three exceptions in the past 100 years.

Hegseth

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“The most effective army is the one that the enemy does not want to face on the battle [field]..”

• Pete Hegseth Will Be Confirmed As Secretary of Defense, Predicts His Lawyer (JTN)

Timothy Parlatore, the attorney for Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, on Monday said that he believes his client has enough support in the Senate to get him confirmed early next year. President-elect Donald Trump nominated Hegseth, a former Fox News host, for the position last month, but reports of allegations of sexual misconduct and heavy drinking have threatened to derail his confirmation. Parlatore said that the nominee has had some positive discussions with Republican senators in recent weeks that have focused on policy, which have helped them feel more confident in confirming Hegseth. The lawyer did not have a specific count for how many Republicans are now on board with Hegseth, but said his team was “feeling very good” about the numbers.

The attorney also said that Hegseth had a good discussion with Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, who described the conversation on Monday as “encouraging.” “I think that once … you kind of strip away all of the anonymous, you know, fake claims, then that gives him the opportunity to sit down with Senator Ernst and others and start talking about policy,” Parlatore said on the “Just The News, No Noise” TV Show. “Let’s talk about what we’re going to actually do to improve the Pentagon. And I think that that is one place where the two of them really have found common ground.” Parlatore said that some of the policy ideas that Hegseth has would get “politics” out of the Defense Department, and that he is focused on returning the department to military readiness and projecting a strong military to deter enemies from attacking. “The most effective army is the one that the enemy does not want to face on the battle [field],” Parlatore said.

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“.. because the DOJ sought court approval ex parte to keep its surveillance secret, he wasn’t alerted until earlier this fall, six years after the initial subpoena.”

• DOJ Spied On Kash Patel, Staffers Without Telling Courts (JTN)

The Justice Department spied on two House members and and several congressional staffers in a leak investigation without telling the courts, the agency’s inspector general found in a sweeping investigation released Tuesday. As a result, the department obtained phone records from the two members of Congress and 43 staff members including President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, who worked as a staffer on the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee at the time. The department initiated the probe to investigate leaks to the media of FBI classified information as part of the now-discredited Trump-Russia probe which had recently been shared with Congress.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the Justice Department, in filings with the court, did not reference “the fact that they related to requests for records of Members of Congress or congressional staffers,” despite implicating constitutional separation of powers between two government branches. Patel, who is poised to become the new director of the FBI if confirmed, previously sued former Trump Justice Department officials and FBI Director Christopher Wray, accusing them of violating his Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures when they tried to obtain Patel’s personal records, Just the News previously reported. Patel said he was completely unaware of the subpoena until December 2022, when Google notified him about it.

Another former staffer, Jason Foster, previously told Just the News that he confirmed that the government successfully asked a federal court to hide its spying on Congress for five consecutive years. Foster is now the head of the Empower Oversight whistleblower center. In 2017 at the time of the secret surveillance, he was the chief investigative counsel for Sen. Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The seizure of his personal data occurred in 2017 while he worked for the Senate, and ordinarily under the original court order, Foster would have been notified a year later. But because the DOJ sought court approval ex parte to keep its surveillance secret, he wasn’t alerted until earlier this fall, six years after the initial subpoena.

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He should not be allowed to keep this hanging over Trump’s head.

• How Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Plans To Keep Trump Case Alive (ZH)

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – who had a Biden DOJ plant in his legal case against former President Donald Trump – is trying to ensure his hush money case doesn’t vanish into thin air as Trump prepares for his return to the White House. According to court filings revealed Tuesday, Bragg’s office is fiercely opposed to dismissing the case outright but is open to pausing proceedings while Trump serves his second term as president. The 82-page legal brief, prosecutors’ most detailed argument yet, stops short of recommending an explicit course of action but outlines several ways to keep the case alive. Among them: delaying sentencing until after Trump leaves office in 2029 or freezing the case while leaving the jury’s guilty verdict intact, The Hill reports.

“The extreme remedy of dismissing the indictment and vacating the jury verdict is not warranted in light of multiple alternative accommodations that would fully address the concerns raised by presidential immunity,” wrote Assistant District Attorney Christopher Conroy. The filing comes as Trump, now president-elect, wages a legal battle to quash the 34 felony charges stemming from hush money payments to an adult film star. Trump’s lawyers claim his status as president-elect grants him immunity and demands immediate dismissal. Prosecutors, however, aren’t buying it. They argue that immunity doesn’t apply until Trump is inaugurated, meaning the case could theoretically proceed to sentencing before January 20, 2025 — a prospect Trump has vowed to fight tooth and nail. Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial, will now decide the case’s fate, with a ruling expected any day.

The DA’s office acknowledged the complications of prosecuting a sitting president but stopped short of saying the case should be completely shelved. Trump was convicted by a Manhattan Jury ‘of his peers’ on 34 counts of falsifying business records, however his reelection to the highest office in the land has put a damper on prosecutors’ plans. Sentencing was initially scheduled for last month, only to be postponed indefinitely by Judge Merchan, making it increasingly unlikely Trump will face punishment anytime soon. That would leave open the possibility that Trump could still proceed to sentencing in 2029, after he leaves office. Alternatively, state prosecutors said the judge could terminate the case without tossing Trump’s conviction, noting a jury verdict removed the presumption of innocence, he was never sentenced and his conviction was “neither affirmed nor reversed” on appeal because of presidential immunity. -The Hill

Trump’s legal team is crying foul, claiming the prosecution disrupts his transition efforts and his ability to govern effectively. “Wrongly continuing proceedings in this failed lawfare case disrupts President Trump’s transition efforts and his preparations to wield the full Article II executive power authorized by the Constitution pursuant to the overwhelming national mandate granted to him by the American people on November 5, 2024,” Trump’s attorneys fumed in a recent filing. Prosecutors hit back, accusing Trump of using delay tactics to muddy the waters. “Having filed those motions to dismiss and then sought repeated adjournments of sentencing to permit their determination by this Court, it is particularly brazen for defendant to argue that the Supremacy Clause bars the Court from taking any action on the motions defendant himself filed,” Conroy wrote.

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“.. the judge had wanted the jury to convict Penny, but that jurors, who ride the subways, understood Penny acted to save others.”

• Giuliani Says Jury Verdict In Penny’s Case Is A Black Eye To Bragg (JTN)

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Monday night claimed that a New York City jury sent a strong message to the city’s ruling elite by finding Daniel Penny clear of any wrongdoing in the death of Jordan Neely. Penny, a former Marine, was acquitted by the Manhattan jury earlier Monday, after he kneeled on Neely’s neck on a subway last year, which prosecutors argued resulted in the man’s death. The jury was deadlocked on a more serious charge last week, which resulted in the charge being dismissed, but they only debated the lesser charge briefly on Monday before finding Penny innocent. Giuliani said that the verdict was a “shocker” given how fast it was reached, but that it was “great day … for justice.” He also claimed the judge had wanted the jury to convict Penny, but that jurors, who ride the subways, understood Penny acted to save others.

“The jury of New Yorkers, and they ride the subways and you can be the most left wing wacko [but] you ride the subways, you’re scared,” Giuliani said on the “Just The News, No Noise” TV show. “And Penny, they know Penny did the right thing. This is a person to person, human reaction above the heads of the fools that have run the city for so long. The crazy, silly, criminal-loving liberals.” Giuliani also said that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg should have resigned or been removed from office the second he claimed he would not prosecute people “for beating up cops” or “resisting arrest.” “He’s probably not prosecuted half the cases that come before him,” Giuliani said. “He’s responsible for any number of murders in New York, and beatings. There are probably seven to 10,000 criminals walking the streets of New York that would not [be] if I were the mayor or Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly.”

The former mayor added that Neely, who has a history of mental illness and had been arrested himself in the past, should not have been on the street to begin with. “The person who caused this is number one, the New York system, and then the people who didn’t deal with his mental illness,” Giuliani said. “Mr. Penny didn’t have anything to do with this. He just tried to save people. [Neely’s] father had years to try to save us from this guy, and didn’t do a damn thing.”

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“..the regime of Vladimir Zelensky has completely lost its legitimacy and, as a result, its ability to be negotiated with.”

• Russia Close To Winning Ukraine Conflict – Spy Chief (RT)

Kiev’s military is now close to complete collapse, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin has said, adding that the current Ukrainian government has completely lost its legitimacy and is unfit for talks. In an interview with the Russian magazine Razvedchik (“Spy”) released on Tuesday, Naryshkin reiterated that the Ukraine conflict is essentially not a battle against Kiev but rather a struggle against the collective West, and that Russia’s freedom and sovereignty is at stake. The intel chief expressed optimism about Russia’s progress on the battlefield. “The frontline situation is not in Kiev’s favor. The strategic initiative in all areas belongs to us, we are close to achieving our goals, while the Ukrainian army is on the verge of collapse.”

According to Naryshkin, the regime of Vladimir Zelensky has completely lost its legitimacy and, as a result, its ability to be negotiated with.” The Ukrainian leader’s presidential term expired this past May, after he refused to hold a new election, citing the ongoing martial law. Russian forces have been making steady progress in recent weeks. Ukrainian commanders, meanwhile, have been complaining about a lack of manpower and exhaustion in their ranks, despite the draft age having been lowered from 27 to 25 and mobilization rules tightened this past spring. Moscow has said that its main goals in the conflict are Ukraine’s neutrality, demilitarization, and denazification. It has also signaled that it is ready to declare an immediate ceasefire and begin peace talks as soon as Ukraine withdraws from all Russian territories, including Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye Regions.

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If woke is the only identity you have left…

• Obstruction of Immigration Enforcement Could Prove Costly for Citizens (Turley)

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston recently became the latest Democratic leader to engage in a chest-pounding call to arms in resistance to the incoming Trump administration’s plan to deport people who entered the United States unlawfully. While a post-election poll by YouGov for CBS News shows that a massive 73% of adults want President-elect Donald Trump to prioritize the repatriation of illegal migrants, the mayor pledged to not only have Denver police “stationed at the county line to keep (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) out” but also that “you would have 50,000 Denverites there.” Johnston said it would be like a “Tiananmen Square moment” and answered yes when questioned whether he’d be ready to go to jail. That moment soon passed, however, as lawyers apparently explained to the mayor that armed resistance to the federal government is often called – wait for it – insurrection.

It appears that Johnston was not keen on becoming the Jefferson Davis of the left, so he backpedaled, stating, “Would I have taken it back if I could? Yes, I probably wouldn’t have used that image.” Yet, Johnston is not alone in pledging resistance to repatriation efforts. Cities are reaffirming or adopting sanctuary city status, including most recently Boston. The cities pledge to continue their ban on any cooperation with the federal government in detaining or removing unlawful migrants. Other mayors are pledging to use city funds to pay for the defense costs of those fighting deportation. The doubling down on sanctuary city promises will likely draw more migrants to those communities, which some mayors have welcomed despite the heavy costs of housing, education and other city services.

Immigration proved to be one of the top issues for voters in this year’s election, which brought control of both houses of Congress and the White House to the GOP. Citizens overwhelmingly supported new tough immigration measures, including deportations. With Democratic cities joining the “resistance,” they may find the costs even higher. Congress cannot compel cooperation without triggering constitutional concerns. In Federalist #46, James Madison recognized the right of state officials to oppose federal policies, including “the refusal to co-operate with officers of the Union.” In cases such as Printz v. United States (1997), which involved federal requirements that states cooperate on gun control measures, the Supreme Court enforced an anti-commandeering line that allowed states to refuse such federal orders.

However, this is a two-way street. Just as cities and states do not have to carry water for the federal government, the federal government does not have to supply the water to the states. The second Trump administration and Congress can play hardball by barring federal funds in various areas for these cities. With their status as sanctuary cities, housing, law enforcement and social programming costs will continue to rise. Many of those budgets are heavily infused with federal funding. However, if cities resist or frustrate federal policy, there are ample reasons why the federal government might restrict funding. Such measures can go too far. The Supreme Court has warned that financial penalties can be so coercive that they effectively commandeer states. However, the federal government is not required to spend money on services where costs are rising at least in part because of resistance to federal law.

Under constitutional law, the federal government cannot be a bully, but it does not have to be a chump.It’s clear that elected leaders like Johnston did not think very long or well before starting a war with the incoming administration. In addition to the possible loss of federal funds, acts of resistance can trigger criminal liability if they amount to actively shielding or hiding unlawful migrants sought by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Under federal immigration law, it is a felony when anyone in “knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation.”

That is not triggered by a simple refusal to cooperate, but some officials have been accused of crossing the line, including state judges. It also could endanger private groups that work closely with these cities in housing and transporting unlawful migrants. Moreover, as I wrote recently, Trump can cite a curious ally in this fight: Barack Obama. During the Obama administration, the federal government largely triumphed over states in barring their interference with federal immigration policies. Back then, Democrats supported President Obama in claiming that the federal government had overriding authority on immigration in cases like Arizona v. United States. The pressure on cities could grow if the Trump administration prioritizes members of violent gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or Tren de Aragua for deportation. To resist those efforts would be politically unpalatable in cities dealing with crime associated with such gangs. It could take years to hash out these efforts. However, if Denver’s Mayor Johnston is any measure of the resistance, the chest-pounding may decline when the federal funding dries up.

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“Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.”

• Bernie Sanders Says Musk Is Right On Military Spending (JTN)

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency has energized Republicans, but it’s also receiving attention from some liberal lawmakers, including Bernie Sanders. Sanders, the independent from Vermont, wants to help Trump’s DOGE, which is co-led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Sanders has his eye on the U.S. military budget. “Elon Musk is right,” Sanders wrote on X. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.”

Sanders’ comments come before the U.S. House is set to vote on a compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes nearly $900 billion to support U.S. military service members, infrastructure, and defense capabilities during the 2025 fiscal year. The 1,813-page document released Saturday by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees outlines U.S. defense policy priorities and their costs for 2025. Most of the proposed funds, $849.9 billion out of the $895.2 billion topline, would go to programs within the Department of Defense. Ramaswamy and Musk wrote in a November op-ed that the military is on their list. “The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent,” they wrote.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s annual audit once again resulted in a disclaimer opinion. That means the federal government’s largest agency can’t fully explain its spending. The disclaimer this year was expected. And it’s expected again next year. The Pentagon previously said it will be able to accurately account for its spending by 2027. Musk has gone even farther in his criticism of military spending. He called the military’s most expensive ever project, the F-35 stealth fighter, “obsolete.” “The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people,” Musk wrote on X. “This made it an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none. Success was never in the set of possible outcomes. And manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.”

In May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found the cost of the Pentagon’s most expensive weapon system was projected to increase by more than 40% despite plans to use the stealth fighter less, in part because of reliability issues. The U.S. Department of Defense’s F-35 Lightning II is the most advanced and costly weapon system in the U.S. arsenal. It’s a joint, multinational program that includes the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, seven international partners and foreign military sales customers. The Pentagon has about 630 F-35s. It plans to buy about 1,800 more. And it intends to use them through 2088. DOD estimates the F-35 program will cost over $2 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain over its lifetime. The Pentagon hasn’t responded to Musk’s comments. Late last month, a reporter asked Defense Department Press Secretary Air Force Major General Pat Ryder about Musk’s comments on the F-35.

“Yeah, as I’m sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently a private citizen, I’m not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35.” Trump set lofty goals for the new group. “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project,’ of our time,” Trump’s announcement said. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.” The original Manhattan Project was a research and development project during the second World War that led to the creation of nuclear weapons. Ramaswamy and Musk have previously outlined their plans for DOGE, which could include mass federal layoffs and reductions in federal regulations. Musk and Ramaswamy said they won’t rely on action from Congress and will instead “focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”

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There will be another accident. And then?

• Boeing Reportedly Restarts 737 Max Production (ZH)

Boeing has reportedly resumed production of its 737 Max aircraft at its Renton factory in Seattle, Washington, a little more than a month after a seven-week strike by 33,000 unionized factory workers concluded with a new contract. This marks a critical step in the company’s recovery efforts during a particularly turbulent year. Reuters was the first to report on Boeing’s restart of production of its best-selling commercial jet. According to three sources familiar with the situation, production at the Renton factory resumed last Friday. “Production resumed on Friday, said one of the sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with media. Boeing declined to comment.” -RTRS. Analysts at Jefferies forecast that Boeing will likely average around 29 737 Max jets per month in 2025, falling far short of the company’s pre-restriction goal of 56.

Earlier this year, the FAA capped 737 Max production at 38 per month due to safety vulnerabilities within Boeing’s production line at Renton. Two Max crashes, Covid travel downturn, supply chain snarls, financial challenges, and multiple Max jet incidents — including a door panel blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 — have been mounting headwinds for the struggling planemaker. On top of this all, a seven-week strike sent the company to the brink of a devastating stall. The good news is that Boeing is under new leadership, with newly appointed CEO Kelly Ortberg dismantling disastrous DEI initiatives and shifting the focus to safety as the era of wokeism comes to an abrupt end. As of mid-November, Goldman’s Noah Poponak and Anthony Valentini still had a “Buy” rating on the planemaker with a 12-month price target of $200.

“Our 12-month price target of $200 is derived from targeting a 4.5% free cash flow yield on 2026E free cash, discounted back one year at 12%. Key risks: (1) the pace of air traffic growth, (2) supply chain ability to ramp-up production, and (3) contract operating performance within the defense segment,” the analysts said. Shares of Boeing were up 1% to $158 handle in premarket trading. However, on the year, shares were down 40%. Shares have been locked in a multi-year lateral between $100 and $250 following the Max jet crashes. FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker recently told Reuters that he wouldn’t be surprised if it took the company a couple of months to ramp production at Renton to the FAA’s production limit.

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“[Elon] Musk put the GEC on the map in March 2023, when he deemed it to be the “worst offender in U.S. government”..

• State Dep. Scrambles To Scuttle $100M Censorship Network Before Trump (ZH)

The State Department revealed in a Monday filing that they are “substantially likely” to shut down their $100M Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was revealed in early 2023 to have been funding a “disinformation” tracking group which worked to pressure advertisers to demonetize outlets it accuses of spreading “disinformation.” Except, they’re really just “realigning” the “Center’s staff and funding to other Department offices and bureaus for foreign information manipulation.” The move comes amid a lawsuit from Texas AG Ken Paxton and several conservative media outlets listed a GEC-funded “dynamic exclusion list” of websites it doesn’t like, which it would then distribute to ad tech companies – such as Microsoft’s Xandr – in order to try and “defund and downrank these worst offenders,” and deprive said sites of ad revenue.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1864036564579561767

As Headline News’ Ken Silva notes further; it’s unclear how the GEC’s closure will affect the lawsuit. Monday’s court filing said lawyers for all parties are still discussing the implications. [Elon] Musk put the GEC on the map in March 2023, when he deemed it to be the “worst offender in U.S. government” when it comes to censorship and media manipulation. According to revelations from the “Twitter Files”—a trove of internal records about the censorship decisiosn made within the social media company—the GEC funded groups such as the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which in turn compiled blacklists of Twitter accounts that were supposedly tied to foreign disinformation campaigns. The Digital Forensic Research Lab sent those blacklists to Twitter so that the company could deactivate the accounts listed.

Federalist senior legal correspondent Margot Cleveland further revealed in April 2023 that the GEC marketed anti-conservative censorship products to private-sector tech firms. Cleveland also noted that the GEC apparently worked with infamous FBI Agent Elvis Chan, who was revealed in the Twitter Files to be in constant touch with the social media firm about censorship issues. Despite those scandals, Democrats had been pushing to renew the GEC’s $100 million budget before it expires at the end of the year. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who drafted the original legislation in 2016 that led to the GEC, argued last year that the censorship network was crucial to counter foreign disinformation. “There’s no way to combat Russian and Chinese misinformation without the GEC,” Murphy insisted.

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The Russians weren’t going to save Assad yet another time. Cost/benefit.

• Putin-the-Unready Is Beginning to be Held Accountable (Paul Craig Roberts)

John Helmer’s December 8 report from Moscow substantiates my conclusion that the Russian government’s inability to acknowledge reality, instead relying on agreements with Russia’s enemies, results in failure . In Ukraine by trying to minimize conflict, the Kremlin maximized conflict. In Syria relying on diplomatic rather than military means resulted in a massive strategic defeat for Russia and Iran. The Middle East, where the correlation of forces were moving against US/Israeli dominance, has been lost to Greater Israel and US control of oil flows and waterways. From Moscow John Helmer reports that recriminations are running high for Putin’s loss of Syria. And it is not only Putin who is being held accountable but also the commanders of Russia’s forces in Syria, head of the General Staff General Valery Gerasimov, Russian military intelligence (GRU), and the Defense Ministry.

They are all damned for failure to detect, warn, and act to prevent the Israeli-American-Turkish overthrow of Assad and the Syrian government. The same group of failures are damned for failure to prevent the Israeli air force from preventing the resupply of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards from providing reinforcements. Putin, like American presidents, puts the defense of Israel before the interests of his own country. Putin is so fearful of offending Israel that he constantly refused to provide his Syrian ally air defense from Israeli attacks. Now that Putin and Lavrov, essentially two 20th century American liberals, have brought a massive strategic defeat down on their heads and Iran’s, Russia’s last remaining Middle East ally, it is likely that Netanyahu and Trump’s Zionist appointees will behave more aggressively against Iran and Russia.

The Zionist are on a roll, having reversed their declining fortunes in one fell swoop while again Putin sat on his butt. As much as I admire Putin, he is certainly not proactive, or sometimes even aware, and thus lacks the leadership ability that a leader of a threatened country needs. Putin would be perfect in peace time, but he is not up to dealing with an existential threat. Putin and Lavrov are too fearful of offending someone to be able to act. I don’t know how far the recriminations will go. But if Washington should also succeed with its color revolution in Georgia, the Zionist neoconservatives could succeed in their plan to destabilize Putin. Whether Putin’s fall would help the neoconservative agenda depends on his replacement. The chance is high that Putin would be replaced with a more determined war leader. Regardless, the Russian defeat has caused a loss of confidence in Putin’s leadership, and it will encourage more provocations that are not good for peace.

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“If Tesla does become the world’s most valuable company by far, that short position will bankrupt even Bill Gates..”

• Elon Musk Jokes Bill Gates Could Go “Bankrupt” On Short Tesla Bet (ZH)

The rivalry between two of America’s top billionaires, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, continued on Tuesday morning when Musk jokingly suggested on X that Gates’ alleged short position on Tesla might lead to his financial demise. “If Tesla does become the world’s most valuable company by far, that short position will bankrupt even Bill Gates,” Musk wrote on X, referring to a multi-billion dollar equity short Gates put on Tesla a couple of years ago.

According to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Musk, Gates held an undisclosed short position in Tesla, allegedly worth billions. In late 2023, Musk wrote on X: “Gates placed a massive bet on Tesla dying when our company was at one of its weakest moments several years ago. Such a big short position also drives the stock down for everyday investors,” adding, “To the best of my knowledge, Gates *still* has that massive bet against Tesla on the table. Someone should ask him if he does.” Musk noted, “The lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy of Gates who had the nerve to ask me to donate to his mostly window-dressing environmental causes, while simultaneously aiming to make $500M from Tesla’s demise, boggles the mind …”

[..] There is still no word on whether Gates has doubled or tripled down – or possibly cut his Tesla short bet. Tesla shares have surged 62.5% this year, primarily due to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory and Musk’s increasing relationship with the incoming administration. In terms of wealth, Bloomberg data shows Musk is number one on the Billionaire Index at $376.2 billion, while Gates is number six at $165.9 billion. Regarding Tesla, the company’s market capitalization is nearing $1.3 trillion, and it ranks eighth on the list of the world’s most valuable companies. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas wrote in a June note that Tesla is much more than an EV company, with tailwinds in the powering up America theme in the era of AI data centers. Naomi Seibt, a German teen who denounces the woke agenda, wrote on X, “Can’t imagine a greater form of retribution than bankrupting the vaccine vegan.” Another X user asked: “Why would someone who constantly talks about protecting the environment short the stock of one of the most environmentally friendly companies on the planet?”

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“It’s a disfavored practice to go to a second Supreme Court justice after the first one has turned down the request, so it was a long shot..”

• SCOTUS Asked to Block State From Probing Doctors Who Question COVID Policies (ET)

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week revived an emergency application to block the Washington Medical Commission from investigating licensed physicians in the state over their criticism of COVID-19 policies. The Washington state commission deems the doctors’ dissenting views on the disease as potentially dangerous misinformation that should be suppressed. The physicians counter that just because they have medical licenses they don’t forfeit their free speech rights under the First Amendment. The Dec. 4 order by Thomas regarding the application in Stockton v. Ferguson was unusual in that Justice Elena Kagan rejected the same application on Nov. 20. The applicants renewed their request in a court filing directed to Thomas on Nov. 22. Supreme Court rules allow an application that has been denied by one justice to be presented to another justice. Neither Thomas nor Kagan explained their respective decisions.

The application is now scheduled to be considered by all nine justices at the court’s private judicial conference on Jan. 10, 2025. The justices could grant an injunction against the commission, deny the injunction, or schedule the case for oral argument. As of Dec. 6, the Supreme Court had not requested a reply from the commission. The application was brought by former professional basketball player John Stockton along with Drs. Richard Eggleston, Thomas Siler, and Daniel Moynihan and another 50 unidentified medical doctors, as well as Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. President-elect Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025, has nominated Kennedy to be secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, an attorney, is also listed as co-counsel on the application.

The applicants filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, which denied the injunction on May 22. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the injunction on Sept. 3. An appeal remains pending in the Ninth Circuit. The application states that it concerns the state’s program that targets “Washington-licensed physicians for expressing public views on COVID-19 that diverge from prevailing orthodoxy.” The state calls the doctors’ viewpoint “misinformation” and claims that it may “regulate this speech,” which is something the Supreme Court ruled in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra (2018) that it cannot do, according to the application. “The Court should speak clearly and decisively to state actors, professional organizations, other non-state actors, and the national media: Public speech does not lose its constitutional protection from government action simply because it is uttered by a healthcare professional, even if it is at odds with medical orthodoxy,” the application stated.

In September 2021, based on its authority under Washington state’s Uniform Disciplinary Act, the Washington Medical Commission began enforcing a policy against doctors “for public speech critical of COVID-19 policies,” which has resulted in “disciplinary actions against at least ten healthcare practitioners,” it stated. Around the time the enforcement actions began, Washington Secretary of Health Dr. Umair A. Shah said, “It has never been more vital for trusted healthcare professionals to band together against the threat of misinformation.” “As we battle COVID-19, with so many tools at our disposal to protect ourselves and others, it is viral misinformation, rooted in unfounded scientific claims, that often stands in our way.”

The commission is prosecuting Eggleston and Siler for opinion articles that they wrote in The Lewiston Tribune and American Thinker, respectively, that criticized COVID-19 policies. The applicant Children’s Health Defense, which has a Washington state medical doctor as a member, joined the application because “[the nonprofit group] is actively involved in advocacy and protecting freedom of speech and Covid vaccine related issues and educates the public on these issues,” the application stated. The applicants’ attorney, Richard Jaffe of Sacramento, California, told The Epoch Times that he is “hopeful” about the application. “It’s a disfavored practice to go to a second Supreme Court justice after the first one has turned down the request, so it was a long shot,” he said.

But Thomas “seems to think it’s an important issue” that needs to be heard, Jaffe said. There are many articles in the mainstream media “talking about how they’re not sanctioning enough doctors for speaking out in public against vaccination or repeated boostering,” he said. “The country needs some guidance from the Supreme Court as to what the First Amendment means in terms of a physician’s free speech,” Jaffe said.

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“Offering asylum to these foreigners is simply giving ordinary people a chance to live in freedom..”

• Western Conservatives Find Asylum In The Russian Federation (SCF)

Defending family and traditional values has long been a central guideline of Russian policy, both domestically and diplomatically. Moscow is expanding its efforts to counteract the degrading cultural influence of the West in the country, as well as offering a safe haven for foreigners interested in living in accordance with their ancestral values. Recently, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that makes it easier to obtain visas and citizenship for conservative-minded citizens from countries of degrading neoliberal ideologies. The goal of the Russian initiative is above all humanitarian, providing an opportunity for like-minded citizens to live in peace, away from the psychological and ideological challenges imposed by Western countries that have adhered to the so-called “woke agenda”.

As part of this initiative, Russian state organizations have been implementing various initiatives to provide refuge to foreigners interested in living in the country. A major press conference was recently held, bringing together Russian and foreign citizens interested in sharing their experiences of living in accordance with traditional values in Russia. The conference was led by State Duma deputy Maria Butina, who currently heads the Russian Parliament’s Committee on International Relations, and brought together a number of foreigners and members of civil society, including businesspeople from different sectors. Together with Russian authorities and journalists, foreigners who have taken refuge in Russia were able to share their impressions of life in the country, job opportunities and other personal experiences.

Among the foreign citizens who participated in the event were some public figures, such as the German journalist Anna Lipp, who suffered severe persecution in her country due to her support for the special military operation in Ukraine, and Martin Held, an Austrian citizen and author of the social project “Moya Rossiya”. In addition to them, the Frenchman Alexander Stefanesco, businessman and founder of the project “Ruspatriation”, also participated in the conference, as well as several other distinguished foreigners who were well received in Russia due to their common mentality with the local people. As a result of the conference’s discussion, participants announced the creation of the “Welcome to Russia!” project, which aims to show Russian reality to foreigners interested in living in the country, as well as to assist with processes such as legal bureaucracy and cultural adaptation.

In the end, Russians and foreigners showed interest in contributing to the arrival of more conservative-minded citizens in Russia, which is welcomed by both migrants, who can finally live the way they believe is right, and by natives, who can interact with like-minded foreigners and develop deep cultural ties that strengthen Russia’s image as a civilizational pivot. There is certainly a deep strategic Russian interest in receiving such immigrants. In recent years, Russia has faced a major challenge in integrating thousands of immigrants from the post-Soviet space, mainly from the Caucasus and Central Asia, into its society. On the other hand, Western immigrants, who are almost always Christian and conservative, certainly show fewer cultural barriers to adaptation than Central Asians, which facilitates a balance in the migration scenario, avoiding tensions in public opinion regarding the reception of foreigners.

However, the main point of the Russian project is humanitarian. Conservative people are being persecuted in the Western Hemisphere simply because they do not agree with so-called “progressive” ideas, such as woke culture and the LGBT agenda. Offering asylum to these foreigners is simply giving ordinary people a chance to live in freedom, without the state violating their values and beliefs. In the past, the US has created a strong anti-Russian propaganda campaign advocating a false conservatism, which it justified by the claim that the USSR and post-Soviet Russia were examples of moral degradation. History has shown which side in the world arena really defends traditional values. Today, it is clear to an increasing number of Western citizens that it is not in the US or Europe that Christianity and conservatism are truly valued and protected.

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Cat maze https://twitter.com/i/status/1866310477749555559

 

 

Grass https://twitter.com/i/status/1866327339568976354

 

 

Octopus https://twitter.com/i/status/1866290032614809600

 

 

Spike https://twitter.com/i/status/1866273168563876321

 

 

Change

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Oct 252024
 


Rembrandt van Rijn Study of the Head and Clasped Hands of a Young Man as Christ in Prayer 1655

 

Harris Claims Trump Is Literally Hitler As Dems Enter Election Panic Mode (ZH)
Dems: Trump Was Going To Be Hitler During His First Term, But He Forgot (BBee)
Trump Responds To Harris Over Hitler Comment (RT)
The Press and Pundits Face Devastating Polls on Threat to Democracy (Turley)
Word Salad City (ZH)
Kamala’s Inane Talking Points (Victor Davis Hanson)
Why is Bill Gates Backing Kamala Harris Using Shady Super PAC? (Sp.)
‘No Justice In The West’ – Putin (RT)
Russia To Seize Income From Frozen Western Assets – Finance Minister (RT)
US Making ‘Big Mistake’ By Weaponizing Dollar – Putin (RT)
West’s Belief It Can Defeat Russia ‘A Mere Illusion’ – Putin (RT)
Seven NATO Members Against Ukraine Membership – Politico (RT)
Is Western Civilizational Decline Too Advanced to Be Reversed? (PCR)
EU President Likens Free Speech to Infectious Disease (Leake)
F-35’s Ascent and Nosedive: Costliest Weapon in History Hits Fresh Turbulence (Sp.)
Boeing Workers Reject Wage Deal To End Strike (RT)
Fighting for More Evidence of Assange’s Political Prosecution (Lauria/Elmaazi)

 

 

 

 

CCR

 

 

Vessel https://twitter.com/i/status/1849277732653355421

Trump ad https://twitter.com/i/status/1849117459585925514

RFK

Kirk

ID

Baris

Slain soldier

Calley Means

10 days

Jack Smith https://twitter.com/i/status/1849198408898388084

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Almost everyone expects a civil war to break out over the 2024 election. Trump was commenting on that possible scenario..”

• Harris Claims Trump Is Literally Hitler As Dems Enter Election Panic Mode (ZH)

No president should be trusted to operate outside the bounds of the US Constitution, this is a lesson that has been repeated on multiple occasions throughout American history. Each president should be held accountable for direct violations of their oath of office and each president should be scrutinized by the American public. With that ideal in mind, it’s interesting that the establishment has devoted so much time and energy to pursuing only one president in recent memory for supposed constitutional violations, and that man is Donald Trump. The numerous trespasses perpetrated by the Clintons, the Bush family, Barack Obama, and the Biden/Harris team have gone completely ignored. Why is it that they get a pass while Trump is placed under an electron microscope? Keep in mind, only a couple years ago the American public was embroiled in a life-or-death battle to stop their constitutional rights from being erased forever by the Biden Administration and their globalist handlers.

Biden’s vaccine passport efforts were particularly troubling; if they had been successful the Bill of Rights would be effectively dead and the federal government would have total control over every detail of civilian life. Good luck keeping a job, going to public places, keeping your kids and staying out of a covid camp should you refuse to take the latest mRNA booster shot. That’s the future Americans were facing under Biden/Harris and the Democrats. Covid hysteria and the government response is exactly what fascism looks like, and a large number of Democrats cheered for these policies. This is why the accusations by the political left calling Donal Trump “literal Hitler” ring rather hollow. They’ve been acting like authoritarians for the past four years they’ve been in power and the hypocrisy is steaming.

Kamala Harris recently held a press briefing to make a statement comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, an action which smacks of panic in the midst of polling numbers which increasingly show Trump winning by a landslide in November. In only two weeks, the Democrats face a conservative red wave the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades. It’s obvious they’ve run out of ideas on how to counter this outcome. Harris’ accusation that Trump “wants generals like Hitler had” is based on a hearsay claim from Gen. John Kelly. This is the same man that Trump fired while in office for incompetence. The same man that claimed in 2023 that Trump called military casualties “suckers” and “losers”. There is no proof to verify any of Kelly’s assertions.

[..] It is true, though, that Trump suggested using the National Guard to stop leftist riots. Trump noted in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures” that: “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics…” “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen…”

The corporate media has latched onto this narrative, suggesting that this is a precursor to a fascist future. But if one remembers back to the days of the BLM riots and burning cities, the idea of National Guard intervention makes perfect sense. Military intervention is another matter and it’s fair to debate such a premise. However, let’s not forget that there have been at least two separate and nearly successful assassination attempts against Trump by leftists (both donators to ActBlue). It’s not crazy to suggest that extreme violence on the part of the political left is possible in the event of a Trump win. They’ve proven capable of it on numerous occasions. Almost everyone expects a civil war to break out over the 2024 election. Trump was commenting on that possible scenario.

It’s also unlikely that Americans today are as willing to tolerate mass political violence from leftists the way they did four years ago. Trump addressing the issue bluntly is not an endorsement of Hitler or fascism, its a recognition of the instability of our times. The political left is well aware that they are likely to lose in November; they might be giving their devout followers the green light to become violent post-election using the Hitler narrative as a rationale. If Trump is “literally Hitler” then all violence is justified, is it not?

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“..Trump would have seized the military to install himself as Emperor God during his first term, but luckily he got distracted by making red hats.”

“Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon Explains the Challenges of Satire in Today’s Climate — ‘Imagine if Your Job is to Write Jokes That Are Funnier Than a Kamala Harris Speech'”.

• Dems: Trump Was Going To Be Hitler During His First Term, But He Forgot (BBee)

Democrats have warned that if elected a second time, Donald Trump will be an evil dictator just like Adolf Hitler. When asked why Trump didn’t become Hitler during his first term, Democrats explained that he simply forgot. “Trump meant to be Hitler, but he forgot,” explained Vice President Harris in a press conference at the White House. “Being Hitler just totally slipped his mind. Make no mistake, if Trump is elected again, he absolutely plans to turn into Hitler and probably will write himself a reminder this time.” According to retired General John Kelly, former President Trump often talked about how he kept meaning to find time to be Hitler, but he kept getting distracted by other things.

“On several occasions, Trump told me word for word, ‘This is it. This is the week I’m going to go be Hitler.’ But then, Trump would get started doing something like handing out candy to Minions and he would completely forget,” explained Kelly. “This time he has written himself lots of notes telling himself to not forget to turn into literal Hitler. It’s terrifying.” At publishing time, Democrats had warned that Trump would have seized the military to install himself as Emperor God during his first term, but luckily he got distracted by making red hats.

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“This is the type of disgusting rhetoric that led to two assassination attempts against President Trump..”

• Trump Responds To Harris Over Hitler Comment (RT)

The increasingly over-the-top rhetoric of US Vice President Kamala Harris proves she is losing and is unfit for the White House, Republican candidate Donald Trump has said. On Wednesday, Harris attacked Trump as a fascist, would-be dictator and admirer of Adolf Hitler, citing reports from Democrat-party linked media based on claims by his former chief of staff. The Atlantic magazine – owned by Democrat mega-donor Lauren Powell Jobs – published a story by Jeffrey Goldberg suggesting that Trump had expressed admiration for Hitler and his generals during his 2017-2021 term in the White House. Goldberg cited retired US Marine General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff, dredging up claims by two New York Times journalists from their 2022 book. Trump’s team have denied the allegations outright.

“Comrade Kamala Harris sees that she is losing, and losing badly, especially after stealing the Race from Crooked Joe Biden, so now she is increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind,” Trump said on X on Thursday. “She is a Threat to Democracy, and not fit to be President of the United States — And her Polling so indicates!” he added. With less than two weeks to go before the November 5 election, both Harris and her running mate Tim Walz and Democrats in down-ballot races have seen their polling lead evaporate, while Trump and the Republicans have picked up steam. Harris then quoted Goldberg’s report to claim that Trump’s alleged admiration for Hitler was “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous” and “a window into who Donald Trump really is.” Harris also accused her rival of having “vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.”

Earlier this week, the Atlantic published another article comparing Trump to Hitler – as well as to Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin – written by Anne Applebaum, the wife of Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski. The Trump campaign dismissed Applebaum’s piece as “fake news by a third-rate media outlet.” They argued that Kelly “beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated” and accused Harris of spreading “outright lies and falsehoods” by treating Goldberg’s allegations as legitimate. “This is the type of disgusting rhetoric that led to two assassination attempts against President Trump,” the campaign wrote. Trump narrowly escaped death at a July 13 rally in Pennsylvania. Another would-be assassin, a pro-Ukrainian activist, was caught last month by the Secret Service lurking at Trump’s golf course in Florida.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1849156315764883467

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“..this would require federal judges to sign off on the rounding up of MSNBC personalities, all gay people, all reporters, and, of course, Whoopi Goldberg.”

• The Press and Pundits Face Devastating Polls on Threat to Democracy (Turley)

“Democracy dies in darkness” is the Washington Post’s slogan, but can it handle the light? The Post has been doggedly portraying the election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris as a choice between tyranny (Trump) and democracy (Harris). Yet when it commissioned a poll on threats to democracy shortly before the election, it did not quite work out. Voters in swing states believe that Trump is more likely to protect democracy than Kamala Harris, who is running on a “save democracy” platform. The poll sampled 5,016 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. When asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43% picked Trump while 40% picked Harris. Notably, this was the same result when President Biden was the nominee.

While over half said that threats to democracy were important to them, the voters trusted Trump (44%) more than Biden (33%) in protecting democracy. Even with the slight improvement for Harris, the result was crushing for not just many in the Harris campaign but the press and pundits who have been unrelenting in announcing the end of democracy if Harris is not elected. Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has declared with authority that either you vote for Harris, or this “may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast.” I have long criticized the apocalyptic, democracy-ending predictions of Biden, Harris and others as ignoring the safeguards in our system against authoritarian power. Nevertheless, Harris supporters have ratcheted up the rhetoric to a level of pure hysteria. Recently, Michael Cohen, a convicted felon and Trump’s disbarred former lawyer, told MSNBC that if Trump wins the election, he will “get rid of the judiciary and get rid of the Congress.”

Recently, MSNBC host Al Sharpton and regular Donny Deutsch warned viewers that they will likely be added to an enemies “list” for some type of roundup after a Trump election. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow also joined in the theme of a final stand before the gulag: “For that matter, what convinces you that these massive camps he’s planning are only for migrants? So, yes, I’m worried about me — but only as much as I’m worried about all of us.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was quick to add her own name to a list that seems to be constantly updated by the media. She told podcast host Kara Swisher, “I mean, it sounds nuts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy threw me in jail.” On ABC’s “The View,” the hosts are becoming indistinguishable from tinfoil-hatted subway prophets. Whoopi Goldberg even explained how Trump is already committed to being a dictator who will “put you people away … take all the journalists … take all the gay folks … move you all around and disappear you.”

Of course, assuming that Cohen is wrong that there will be no courts after a Trump victory, this would require federal judges to sign off on the rounding up of MSNBC personalities, all gay people, all reporters, and, of course, Whoopi Goldberg. All that is required is for over two centuries of constitutional order to fail suddenly, and for virtually every constitutional actor in our system to suddenly embrace tyranny. Those pushing this hysteria often curiously cite the January 6 riot as proof that the end is near. Yet that horrible day was the vindication, not the expiration, of our constitutional system. The system worked. The riot was put down. Congress, including Republicans, reassembled and certified Biden as the next president.

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“Voters asked direct question. Harris gave circular answers.”

• Word Salad City (ZH)

Kamala Harris’ completed another descending spin around her doom loop on Wednesday night: Lagging Trump in battleground states and therefore under pressure to increase her interactions with voters, she participated in a prime-time town hall that only further exposed her as one of the most superficial politicians of our time…with more poll damage sure to follow. The town hall was hosted by CNN and took place in Delaware County. Along with Chester, Bucks and Montgomery, it’s one of four Philadelphia “collar counties” that have traditionally played an outsize role in determining who wins Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. . You know things went bad when even the New York Times raked Harris over the coals for being evasive, saying: “Voters asked direct question. Harris gave circular answers.”

After the event, CNN’s Dana Bash said, “What I’m hearing from people who I’ve been talking to … if her goal was to close the deal, they’re not sure she did that.” Seasoned Democratic operative David Alexrod called out Harris’ signature flaw: “The things that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to Word Salad City.” Harris’ worst sequence of the night came when host Anderson Cooper called out her flip-floppy hypocrisy on the issue of border security. Noting that Harris now supports a bill that would allocate $650 million toward a border wall, Cooper said, “Under Donald Trump, you criticized the wall more than 50 times. You called it stupid, useless and a ‘medieval vanity project.’ Is a border wall stupid?”

By this point, even Cooper had to wonder why he was even bothering to ask questions, given Harris’ refusal to answer them in any kind of straightforward way:

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“..only two criteria matter: Which candidate’s past record and current agenda best appeal to voters? And which candidate seems the most authentic and genuine?”

• Kamala’s Inane Talking Points (Victor Davis Hanson)

As Vice President Kamala Harris slips in the polls, the Democratic National Committee/Harris Campaign/mainstream media fusion talking points become even more absurd. Claiming that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump were “weird” did not work—especially given the genuinely odd behavior of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and would-be First Gentleman Doug Emhoff. Nor was the next Harris meme convincing that the frenetic and non-stop Trump was somehow “exhausted,” “senile,” and “confused.” Voters know the workdays of the younger Harris are usually far shorter—or sometimes not workdays at all. But Harris also falsely claimed the physically and mentally challenged Biden was, in her words, “absolutely authoritative” and “very bold and vibrant.” Now Harris asserts that Trump is a “fascist,” a “dictator,” and “unfit” for office. But this new talking point will also not stop the Harris campaign’s hemorrhaging—and for a variety of reasons.

First, voters see the election as a conflict of two absolutely antithetical visions. On the one hand, is the prior Trump 2017-20 concrete record: border security, no major wars abroad, calm in the Middle East, a deterred Russia, Iran, and China, low inflation, low interest rates, lower crime, lower taxes, strong deterrent military—and opposition to mandatory electric vehicle mandates, biological males competing in women’s sports, and the woke/DEI agenda. On the other hand, is the Biden-Harris 2021-2024 record: the unchecked entry of 12-20 million illegal aliens and a destroyed border. People still struggle under Biden-Harris’s earlier hyperinflation and high interest rates. The horrific regional wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue. Biden-Harris embraces the unpopular DEI/Woke agenda. Harris herself knows that the Biden-Harris years were a failure. That is why she has shed almost all of their hard left-wing agendas—policies she has embraced for much of her adult life.

So suddenly, in the last 90 or so days, Harris has completely flipped and flopped. Now she is for more of, not defunding, the police. She pivots for a secure border, not 20 million illegal aliens pouring across it. Harris brags about fossil fuel energy, not banning fracking, and for increasing, not cutting, defense. In fact, several endangered incumbent Democrat senators in swing states are claiming more allegiance to Trump’s issues than identifying with Harris and her unpopular record as vice president. Voters likely conclude that if Trump doubles down on his record, while even Harris and many senators temporarily piggyback on it, then it must be more effective and popular than Harris’s own. Second, Harris now claims Trump is a fascist and insurrectionist. But mouthing ad nausaem “January 6th” no longer persuades voters that Trump is a danger to anyone.

They recall that Harris bragged of the far more violent demonstrations of 2020—35 killed, $2 billion in damage, 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, 14,000 arrested—that the unrest would not and “should not” stop, while drumming up support to bail out jailed violent protestors. Nor does the slur that Trump is a fascist resonate. The Obama and Biden-Harris administrations weaponized the CIA and FBI to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections by peddling the fake Steele dossier and suppressing all the embarrassing news about Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop. Trump certainly did not coordinate, as Biden did, with local, state, and federal prosecutors to wage lawfare prosecutions to destroy his political opponents. He did not use the FBI to partner with social media to suppress the news. Neither Trump nor his supporters tried to remove Biden from state ballots.

The Republican House majority did not impeach Biden twice despite the Biden family’s corruption and Joe Biden’s unlawful, decades-long removal of classified papers to several insecure private residences. Trump and the Republicans never coercively removed the party’s primary-winning nominee. They did not nullify the will of 14 million primary voters. And in backroom fashion, they did not anoint a candidate who had never entered a single primary in her life. Nor did Trump support packing the Supreme Court. He does not seek unconstitutional means of destroying the Electoral College. He is not demanding an end to the Senate filibuster or the creation of two new states to obtain four partisan senate seats. Third, as for Trump being “unfit” and lacking “decorum,” it depends on what were the Biden-Harris standards?

Having a trans activist reveal his breasts on camera at a White House “pride party?” Biden’s reportedly calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a f—ing idiot” and “son of a b—ch?” Bragging about locking Trump up, while waging lawfare against him? Unleashing son Hunter Biden with impunity to shake down foreign governments? The election will not be decided on these empty talking points or fake media-generated narratives. Instead, only two criteria matter: Which candidate’s past record and current agenda best appeal to voters? And which candidate seems the most authentic and genuine?

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“Gates enjoyed a profits bonanza off mRNA coronavirus vaccines mandated by the Biden administration…”

• Why is Bill Gates Backing Kamala Harris Using Shady Super PAC? (Sp.)

Tech billionaire, philanthropist and WEF cheerleader Bill Gates has given Kamala Harris’s campaign a $50 mln boost using dark money super PAC Future Forward. The donation was intended to remain secret, but was uncovered by NYT this week. Set up in 2018 by former Obama campaign staffers and coming out of left field in the final weeks of the 2020 race to fund a massive pro-Biden media blitz, Future Forward is a super political action committee funded mostly by Big Tech and venture capital firms, including Meta*, Google, disgraced crypto financier Sam Bankman-Fried, Bain Capital and Bridgewater Associates. The super PAC has raised a whopping $700 mln for the 2024 election cycle, rolling out $75 mln in pro-Harris ads last week. 2024 is at least the second election cycle where Gates has used a dark money vehicle to support the Democratic Party’s candidate.

In 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed nearly $70 mln to the New Venture Fund, a nonprofit belonging to DC consultancy Arabella Advisors, which bankrolls the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a goliath of undisclosed donations for Democratic politicians and liberal causes which raised nearly $390 mln four years ago. Publicly, Gates and his now former wife also gave $500,000 to Biden’s inaugural committee. Mr. Gates has been an active supporter of Democratic candidates since at least 2008, contributing financially to and praising the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Gates’ ties to the Clintons are deeply rooted, with the billionaire becoming a top donor to the Clinton Foundation, and forging partnerships with the organization for global projects since at least 2013. In a telling interview in 2016 in which he explained his preference for Clinton, Gates said “there have been questions about vaccines in general where some of the candidates have shown that they’re not as up to date about vaccines in general, and that’s got to be a concern.”

“Science in general, whether it’s GMOs or vaccines, there’s a lot of people out there who don’t give science the benefit of the doubt. In terms of experience, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have more experience in global health,” Gates said at the time. With Harris’ presidential bid expected to broadly continue the Biden/Clinton line on foreign and domestic policy, it makes sense for Gates to throw his influence behind the VP, given the perceived threat of the Trump brand of red-pill MAGA Republicans and their anti-vax, anti-tech, and anti-interventionist leanings. “This election is different, with unprecedented significance for Americans and the most vulnerable people around the world,” Gates said this week after info about his $50 mln donation leaked out. “I think it’s great to have somebody who’s younger, who can think about things like AI and how we shape that in the right way, and I certainly offer up my opinions to the politicians who are interested,” Gates said this summer after Biden dropped out and named Harris his successor.

The Gates Foundation’s fortunes got a big boost under Biden, with its endowment growing from $69 bln in 2020 to $75.2 bln in 2023. Gates enjoyed a profits bonanza off mRNA coronavirus vaccines mandated by the Biden administration. In 2022, he sold off shares of BioNTech stocks he bought in 2019 as sales slowed. His foundation has also owned shares in Pfizer, CureVac and Vir Biotech going back to well before the pandemic. The billionaire’s foundation supports the Global Virome Project – an ambitious initiative created in 2018 to predict pathogens that could trigger lethal pandemics, but accused of weaponizing viruses from a network of 150 biolabs worldwide. Gates has also backed a broad array of World Economic Forum-affiliated initiatives, including projects to reduce emissions and create synthetic meat and dairy. In 2022, The Seattle Times revealed Gates’ secret lobbying to save Biden’s signature $2+ trln Build Back Better social and climate spending package.

Gates has also been a top backer of the Biden administration’s battle against media and online ‘misinformation’, with an explosive MintPress investigation from 2021 revealing that his foundation had bankrolled some $319 mln in media, including CNN, the BBC, Le Monde, the Financial Times, Der Spiegel and others to ensure favorable coverage of his agenda and that of his allies.

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“Is this just? There is no justice here,” Putin said. “We want to change this. And we will.”

• ‘No Justice In The West’ – Putin (RT)

Moscow has had enough of the West’s impunity and hypocrisy and intends to ensure that there is justice in the world again, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. Putin spoke to journalists, including many from Western outlets, at the end of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia on Thursday. “Is it just to lie to our faces that NATO will not expand, and then [expand] it?” Putin asked BBC’s Steve Rosenberg, in response to his inquiry. “Is it fair to carry out a coup d’etat, spitting on all principles of law, and funding a coup in Ukraine?” he added, referring to the 2014 Maidan ‘revolution’ backed by Washington.

“Is this just? There is no justice here,” Putin said. “We want to change this. And we will.” The Russian president also dismissed as “nonsense” the claims that Moscow was somehow behind “mayhem” on British streets. Whatever may be happening in the UK is the result of London’s own policies, Putin said. The head of the British Security Service (MI5), Ken McCallum, claimed earlier this month that the UK support for Ukraine has made London a target of Russian propaganda and subterfuge, seeking more power and government funding to deal with the alleged threat.

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“..The US and its allies have blocked an estimated $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian central bank..”

“..total foreign direct investments in the Russian economy by the EU, G7, Australia, and Switzerland amounted to $288 billion as of the end of 2022..”

It all adds up to zero AND you’re no longer the reserve currency. Well done.

• Russia To Seize Income From Frozen Western Assets – Finance Minister (RT)

Russia will respond in kind to the West’s use of the income generated by its frozen central-bank reserves, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has said. The US and its allies have blocked an estimated $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian central bank since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. The bulk of the funds, around €197 billion ($213 billion), are being held at the Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear. On Wednesday, Washington announced a decision to use the proceeds from the frozen assets to repay a multibillion-dollar loan to Kiev. “If Western countries have begun utilizing the income from the frozen Russian reserves, we will do exactly the same,” Siluanov told reporters on Thursday. “We have frozen money from ‘unfriendly’ companies and organizations. We keep this money in our accounts in the same way and will use the income from these assets similarly,” he elaborated.

The income from these funds will be allocated to “the needs of the economy, the needs of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation,” the minister added, noting that the corresponding decisions have already been made. The US said on Wednesday that it will provide Kiev with a $20 billion loan as part of a broader $50 billion G7 package. The use of windfall profits from the blocked Russian assets will provide Ukraine assistance “without burdening taxpayers,” US President Joe Biden stated. A day earlier, the European Parliament backed allocating a loan of up to €35 billion ($38 billion) for Kiev using the immobilized Russian assets as collateral for the repayments. According to Euroclear, the frozen funds had generated €3.4 billion ($3.6 billion) in interest as of mid-July.

Russia has repeatedly warned that seizing its assets would amount to “theft” and would violate international law and undermine reserve currencies, the global financial system, and the world economy. The International Monetary Fund has also been raising concerns that such actions could undermine trust in the Western financial system. Siluanov earlier warned that global players are closely following the story involving the Russian assets and are drawing their own conclusions. While the finance minister did not elaborate on the amount of Western assets currently held in Russia, previous calculations by RIA Novosti put the figure at roughly equal the size of the Russian funds frozen abroad. The news agency reported that total foreign direct investments in the Russian economy by the EU, G7, Australia, and Switzerland amounted to $288 billion as of the end of 2022.

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“Russia does not seek to drop the dollar or defeat it, but instead is being “prevented from working with it..”

• US Making ‘Big Mistake’ By Weaponizing Dollar – Putin (RT)

Weaponizing the US dollar is a big mistake, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a session at the BRICS Summit in Kazan on Wednesday. He made the remark following a harsh assessment on the currency’s use as a political tool by the New Development Bank’s (NDB) president, Dilma Rousseff. According to Rousseff, the global geopolitics is being adversely affected by the use of the US dollar “as a weapon to change the living conditions of the population.” The vast wave of sanctions against Russia have forced many Western companies from various industrial sectors including food, clothing, and car manufacturing to leave the country, and have severely restricted people’s ability to travel and make international bank transfers, she noted. Putin agreed with Rousseff’s assessment.

”Yes, indeed, we can see that this is true. In fact, I think it is a big mistake by those who do this. The dollar remains the most important instrument of world finance and using it as a means of achieving political goals undermines confidence in this currency and reduces its capabilities,” the Russian president said. Russia does not seek to drop the dollar or defeat it, but instead is being “prevented from working with it,” Putin added. “Then we are forced to look for other alternatives, which is what is happening.” Many Russian financial institutions were cut off from the Western financial system in 2022 in response to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. As a result, Moscow has accelerated trade with international partners using their national currencies. The trend has been increasingly supported by BRICS members, which have shifted from using the dollar and euro for trade settlements.

In August, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said that over 95% of mutual settlements between Russia and its biggest trading partner, China, are carried out using the ruble or yuan. Putin previously stated that the use of local currencies instead of the dollar or euro “helps to keep economic development free from politics as far as possible in the context of today’s world.”

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“.. they don’t take into account the unity and the strength of spirit of Russians forged over the centuries..”

• West’s Belief It Can Defeat Russia ‘A Mere Illusion’ – Putin (RT)

The West is using Ukraine to threaten Russia’s security while believing in the “illusion” that it can inflict a strategic defeat on Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. Speaking at the extended Outreach/BRICS Plus format session in Kazan on Thursday, Putin stated that the emergence of a “more just world order” is being hampered by “forces accustomed to thinking and acting in the logic of domination over everything and everyone.” According to Putin, the West’s “unlawful unilateral sanctions” and interference in the affairs of other countries under the pretense of “concern for democracy and human rights” are actively undermining regional and global strategic stability, as well as encouraging “interstate strife.”

Putin pointed to Ukraine as an example, stating that it is being used to “create critical threats to Russia’s security” while Moscow’s vital interests, as well as its “just concerns about the infringement on the rights of Russian-speaking people,” are being ignored. Kiev’s foreign backers “do not even hide any longer their goal of inflicting a strategic defeat on our country.” Putin said, adding that the West’s belief that it can achieve its goals is “a mere illusion.” “Only those who don’t know the history of Russia can believe in this, because they don’t take into account the unity and the strength of spirit of Russians forged over the centuries,” Putin stated.

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“..Kiev would become a part of the bloc later when certain conditions are met..”

• Seven NATO Members Against Ukraine Membership – Politico (RT)

A sizable group of NATO members led by the US and Germany are reluctant to extend an invitation to Ukraine anytime soon, Politico reported on Wednesday, citing sources. Last week, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky presented his ‘victory plan’, which included a demand to be immediately invited into the US-led military bloc. However, the Politico article, citing four unnamed US and NATO officials, said that Berlin and Washington are “slow-walking” this request, adding that “key alliance members are worried about getting ensnared in a war with Russia.” US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith told Politico that the bloc “has not, to date, reached the point where it is prepared to offer membership or an invitation to Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz earlier said that it was his duty to prevent the Ukraine conflict from spiraling into a full-scale war between Russia and NATO, adding that Kiev would become a part of the bloc later when certain conditions are met. Hungary and Slovakia – which have been critical of the Western approach to the Ukraine conflict and have insisted on an immediate ceasefire – are two other holdouts. Politico described their leaders as following “a generally pro-Kremlin line.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called Zelensky’s plan outright “terrifying,” while his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico warned that Ukraine’s accession to NATO could lead to World War III.

Furthermore, one NATO official told Politico that “countries like Belgium, Slovenia or Spain are hiding behind the US and Germany” when it comes to the issue of Ukraine’s membership, describing them as “reluctant.” Another source noted that while those nations support Kiev’s NATO aspirations “in the abstract,” they would voice their opposition when push comes to shove. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Kiev’s desire to join NATO – which Moscow has described as an existential threat and an “enemy” – was one of the key reasons for the current conflict in the first place. Officials in Moscow have also said that Ukraine’s membership in the bloc “in any territorial form is absolutely unacceptable to Russia and cannot be part of any peace plans or mediation initiatives.”

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“..turning America into a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel..”

• Is Western Civilizational Decline Too Advanced to Be Reversed? (PCR)

Trump says he intends to make America great again, and his supporters believe him. I also believe it is Trump’s intent. The question is if there is enough left of America to restore. Trump, if he is careful about his appointments, could make a good stab at restoration: Robert Kennedy as the head of the Food and Drug Administration. General Flynn as head of the CIA. Elon Musk as Secretary of State. John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute as Attorney General. Michael Hudson as Secretary of the Treasury. Edward Snowden as Director of the National Security Agency. A number of the police state agencies, such as Homeland Security, could be abolished. So, yes, in theory, Trump could have a go at restoring America. But is Trump capable of even imagining these appointments, and if so could he get them confirmed by the US Senate? I have no confidence that Trump would acquire the human capital his administration would need to do the job he has assigned to himself.

Perhaps his advisors again are serving the establishment, not Trump, telling him that he needs to moderate his attack on the establishment in order to make himself more acceptable to the ruling elite and less of a target for the presstitute media. This is how potential leaders are brought to heel. Among the problems Trump would face is the erosion of the US Constitution with Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, the Wall Street Journal editor, law school deans, and the Woke Left calling for the Constitution’s overthrow because the First Amendment prevents the Ruling Elite from controlling the population by controlling the narrative. The United States is the Constitution. Overthrowing the Constitution is the same as overthrowing the United States. It is treason. Would Trump’s Justice Department arrest these people for treason? The First Amendment prohibits the government from prohibiting the freedom of speech and guarantees the freedom of assembly.

These Constitutional Rights were violated by the Democrats who turned free speech and assembly into an “insurrection.” Democrats, led by the Jew Biden appointed as Attorney General and by the FBI director appointed by Trump, ruled that attending a rally to support a president constituted “insurrection.” One thousand American patriots who attended the Trump Rally are wasting away in prison for no other reason than law was used against them as a weapon. The destruction of the rule of law is the Democrats and the American left-wing’s main achievement. In “free America” law is no longer a shield of the people. Law is a weapon in the hands of those in power to decimate the political opposition. President Trump’s two loyal appointees–General Flynn and Steve Bannon–were both sentenced to prison. Another problem Trump would face is that the liberal-left have turned education into indoctrination. Education is no longer the function of American schools and universities.

Students are brainwashed that Western Civilization has no achievements except racism and exploitation of people of color, that whites are racists, that people can be born into the wrong bodies, that the Constitution is in the way of progress. The normalization of sexual perversity, the sexualization of young children, and open borders are turning America into a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel. This is the accomplishment of the Democrat Party and the liberal-left. So we have in America a system in which the rulers are aligned against America. America, with its Constitution, its separation of powers, its traditions, is in their way, as Hillary, John Kerry, the Wall Street Journal editor, CNN, and law school deans have made clear. One might think that Americans might notice that those who believe in America are being marginalized by those who believe in the Constitution’s overthrow.

There are some Americans who are beginning to realize that truth is being denied them, but are enough catching on in time to prevent the termination of their rights? When we witness the determined illegal persecution of truth-tellers such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Reiner Fuellmich, and one thousand American patriots sent to prison by Democrats for protesting a stolen election, we find ourselves up against a government with a totalitarian agenda. The Republicans are doing nothing about this. What has the Republican Party done to ensure that the November election is not again stolen? In America today it is becoming a felony to even present evidence that an election ( “won” by Democrats ) was stolen. Some of the swing states in which elections are most often stolen by Democrats have not only legalized all of the theft mechanisms but also have made it a felony to challenge the vote count.

The question before us is what does an American election mean other than another stolen election? I agree with Elon Musk. If the Democrats are returned to power in 2024 there will never again be an honest American election. The odds are against the Democrats and the Ruling Elite permitting Trump to become President. If he prevails against the odds and regains the office, it is unlikely he will be staffed with sufficient determined and intelligent appointees to reverse American societal, economic, political, moral, and spiritual decline. Nevertheless, we must vote for Trump or never again will anyone challenge in our name the Ruling Elite’s control over our lives. Every future potential leader will know that Trump stood up to the elite but the people did not stand up for Trump, and they will dismiss the American people as a losing cause.

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“Ursula von der Leyen advocates “pre-bunking” in the public forum to “vaccinate” people against “disinformation.”

• EU President Likens Free Speech to Infectious Disease (Leake)

EU President Ursula von der Leyen just joined the ranks of former Senator John Kerry and other globalist ghouls in declaring war on free speech by perversely proclaiming that the EU citizenry needs to be “vaccinated against disinformation.” Like every censor in history, she characterizes her censorship program as a means of expunging erroneous information and ideas from public discourse. By using the word “disinformation,” she implies that she and her clique are already the sole possessors of the truth about everything, and that everyone who has and shares heterodox ideas is necessarily in error. Her entire premise is FALSE for the following reasons:

1). Knowledge about the world is constantly evolving through constant inquiry, discussion, and dissemination. Knowledge is NOT a static thing. This is why countries with stifling censorship regimes have experienced intellectual, scientific, and artistic stagnation. Their rulers try to freeze the human mind in its state at their moment in history.

2). NO state, university, or ecclesiastical committee has ever been in possession of the full truth of any matter. Official orthodoxies have always been challenged by heterodox thinkers. Indeed, virtually every major advance in human insight has been performed by heterodox thinkers.

3). As John Milton observed in his 1644 pamphlet, Areopagitica, contending with error is an intrinsic part of learning and discovery. We literally learn by making mistakes and correcting them. If free speech is suppressed for the objective of preventing the propagation of erroneous thought—or “vaccinating against it”—it will become extremely difficult if not impossible for people to learn and discover.

4). Without a single exception in history, the people who hold power always advocate the orthodoxy that sustains and extends their power and that of their friends and supporters.

Ursula von der Leyen is the quintessence of this principle. As president of the EU, she conducted secret negotiations with Pfizer CEO to purchase a 20 billion Euros of Pfizer’s fraudulent and dangerous vaccine so that it could be inflicted on all the citizens of the European Union. She is currently under criminal investigation for her conduct in this affair that has come to be known as Pfizergate. It takes a special kind of chutzpah for a powerful state official who is probably guilty of committing a major crime—a crime that has been systematically and ruthlessly concealed—to lecture the public about the need for censorship. The time has come for the citizens of Europe to rid themselves of Ursula von der Leyen and her clique of corrupt tyrants. To be sure, there is increasing evidence that the Biden Administration has been exerting pressure on Germany—which remains an American vassal state—and the EU to step up its censorship regime. I will cover this strange development in a subsequent post.

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“..faulty landing gear and vibrating fuel tubes, to fragile electro-optical targeting equipment, canopy delamination issues and weather sensitivity, engine heat issues adding to wear and tear, cabin over-pressurization, night vision problems, corrosion, radar reset issues, ejection seats which can snap pilots’ necks, and inability to fly in lightning..”

• F-35’s Ascent and Nosedive: Costliest Weapon in History Hits Fresh Turbulence (Sp.)

Conceived as the Pentagon’s next-gen do-it-all strike jet for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, the F-35 has proved a budgetary nightmare, set to consume more resources than the GDP of a major G20 economy over its lifetime. The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fifth-gen supersonic stealth strike fighter just can’t seem to catch a break, with a new report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office finding the jet woefully below mission-ready status for six straight years – i.e. every year that the Congressional watchdog has conducted its reviews. The GAO blamed the readiness shortfall on “challenges with depot and organizational maintenance,” and over-reliance on contractors who essentially hold the Pentagon hostage with astronomical sustainment costs (which jumped from $1.1 trillion in FY2018 to $1.58 trillion in FY2023).

The Navy and Air Force are set to take control of sustainment to get a grip on the situation, but not until FY2027. The GAO estimates that only about 55% of the F-35’s three variants are mission ready at any given time, with mission readiness requiring the ability to “fly and perform at least one mission.” With a per unit cost of nearly $100 mln and a projected lifetime cost of over $2 trln, the F-35 program is by far the most expensive military project in history. Lockheed proceeded with the F-35’s development by taking cues from the Yak-43/141 VTOL jet – a Soviet carrier strike aircraft project scrapped in 1991. The X-35 first flew in 2000, and the F-35A in 2006. But the F-35’s makers have proven unable to work out all the kinks in the plane, with the GAO issuing report after report citing hundreds of flaws, including mission critical defects which could injure or kill pilots, or otherwise jeopardize the aircraft’s safety.

These problems range from faulty landing gear and vibrating fuel tubes, to fragile electro-optical targeting equipment, canopy delamination issues and weather sensitivity, engine heat issues adding to wear and tear, cabin over-pressurization, night vision problems, corrosion, radar reset issues, ejection seats which can snap pilots’ necks, and inability to fly in lightning. To add insult to injury, all three of America’s major potential adversaries have reportedly found the means to nullify the F-35’s stealth advantage, with Russia, China and Iran announcing sophisticated radar technologies not only able to detect the F-35 at long ranges – but even identify the distinct radar signature of individual F-35 planes.

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” The strike has halted production of the best-selling 737 MAX and 767 and 777 wide-body models.”

Which were full of flaws.

• Boeing Workers Reject Wage Deal To End Strike (RT)

Boeing workers have rejected the US aerospace giant’s latest contract offer, extending a nearly six-week strike which has crippled the already struggling planemaker. Some 64% of workers voted to reject the new contract, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), the union representing 33,000 Boeing staff in Washington, Oregon and California, said on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday. “We remain on strike,” IAM District 751 President Jon Holden said after the votes were counted. “Our members deserve more and have spoken loudly.” The latest deal included a 35% wage increase over the four-year contract and a restoration of incentive bonuses, but did not reinstate the pension plan sought by many employees.

Workers with the IAM have been striking since September, when they overwhelmingly rejected Boeing’s previous offer of a 25% cumulative pay raise. Employees had initially sought a 40% pay increase, arguing that their wages had lagged behind inflation for years while the company spent millions of dollars on record executive bonuses. “After 10 years of sacrifices, we still have ground to make up, and we’re hopeful to do so by resuming negotiations promptly,” leaders of the union said in a statement. “This is workplace democracy and also clear evidence that there are consequences when a company mistreats its workers year after year.” The strike has halted production of the best-selling 737 MAX and 767 and 777 wide-body models.

Earlier this month Boeing also announced plans to cut 17,000 jobs over the coming months, representing nearly 10% of its workforce, as the aerospace giant’s losses continue to mount. Boeing reported a $6.2 billion third quarter loss on Wednesday, largely due to costs associated with the strike. Days before the workers voted to extend the strike, Boeing announced that its 777X widebody aircraft will be postponed to 2026, nearly six years after the aircraft was due to reach customers. The embattled aviation giant has also been under increased scrutiny in recent years due to various flaws discovered in its aircraft, leading to safety concerns and investigations.

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“Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

• Fighting for More Evidence of Assange’s Political Prosecution (Lauria/Elmaazi)

A tribunal in Britain is set to decide whether to order the government’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to prove it deleted emails that may have covered up more evidence of a politically motivated prosecution of Julian Assange. The three judges heard arguments on Sept. 24 in the nearly decade-long freedom of information saga regarding the emails that top British prosecutors say were deleted. They involved an exchange with Sweden during a Swedish prosecutor’s attempt, beginning in 2010, to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher from Britain. Assange was wanted in Sweden for questioning during a preliminary investigation into allegations of sexual assault, which was dropped three times, definitively in 2017. He was never charged. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden at the U.K. Supreme Court, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in June 2012, fearing that Sweden would send him to the United States.

Assange spent seven years in the embassy protecting himself from arrest by British police until April 2019, when police dragged him from the diplomatic mission and threw him into London’s maximum security Belmarsh prison. It was only when the U.S. realized it would lose on appeal after a four-year extradition battle that the Department of Justice cut a plea deal with Assange who was released on June 24 and returned to his native Australia. Assange had been charged in the United States under the Espionage Act for possessing and publishing defense information, which revealed evidence of U.S. war crimes. Britain took an active role in Assange’s prosecution. Its Crown Prosecution Service sought to stop Sweden from going to the embassy to question him. Seeking to learn more about Britain’s role against Assange, Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi first made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2015 for all emails between the British and Swedish governments concerning Assange.

Some of the emails she obtained showed political motivation on the part of the lead British prosecutor, Paul Close. One email Maurizi obtained from the Swedish Prosecution Authority (SPA) revealed that Close appeared to be pressuring Swedish prosecutors to continue seeking Assange’s extradition instead of dropping the case or questioning him at the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange had been granted asylum. “My earlier advice remains, that in my view it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant [Julian Assange] in the UK,” Close wrote to the SPA, in 2011, according to one of the emails obtained by Maurizi. “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!,” he wrote to Marianne Ny, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, in 2012. A year after that, Close wrote, “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.” After Maurizi noticed a sizeable gap in the emails released to her she filed another FIOA seeking to obtain the missing emails.

The CPS first claimed that it had destroyed the emails. It said that when Close retired, his account along with his emails, were automatically destroyed. But Maurizi did not buy it. She asked the court at the hearing last month to order the CPS to turn over “metadata” — data about data, such as file creation and modification dates, email sender and recipient addresses, timestamps, email routing information, keywords, and subject lines — proving the emails really were deleted and when. “We have NO certainty whatsoever” that the emails were destroyed, Maurizi wrote in a message to Consortium News. Maurizi is in court because she believes the allegedly deleted emails could provide additional evidence of a politically motivated prosecution of Assange. She also wants metadata on a CPS document that it says is from 2012 explaining the CPS’ email deletion policy, which was only sent to her in 2023.

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1849481946994295174

 

 

 

 

 

 

Urbanism

 

 

Starship https://twitter.com/i/status/1849381012146442723

 

 

Collie

 

 

Wood https://twitter.com/i/status/1849322564264382794

 

 

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Oct 212024
 
 October 21, 2024  Posted by at 8:27 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  62 Responses »


David Hockney Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1972

 

Market ‘Convinced’ Trump Will Win – Druckenmiller (RT)
Trump Promises To Unleash ‘America’s New Golden Age’ (JTN)
Trump Considers No Taxes For Police Officers, Firefighters And Military (ZH)
Trump Claims He Threatened Putin With Strike On Moscow (RT)
In Search of Accountability for Anti-Trump Hoaxes (TON)
Americans Getting Wise To ‘Propaganda Machine’ – Musk (RT)
The Atlantic Mocked For ‘Trump Is Hitler’ Hit-Piece (RT)
Elon Musk Launches Million-Dollar-A-Day Giveaway For Petition Signers (ZH)
Germany and UK To Sign ‘Historic’ Defense Pact – Sunday Times (RT)
Germany’s Scholz Shoots Down Ukraine’s ‘Victory Plan’ (RT)
Is Russia Finally Acknowledging Reality? (Paul Craig Roberts)
Boeing Explores Asset Sales In Potential Shrinking Of Corporate Footprint (ZH)
No, Trump Should Not Sue CBS (Turley)
Gold, Kamala, Trump, Control, Cash, Murder, Water – Austin Fitts (USAW)
‘It’s Like We’re Watching Auschwitz on TikTok’ (Gabor Maté)
Julian Would Not Have Survived Without Plea Deal – Assange’s Father (RT)
Pentagon Says There is No Hard Evidence of Aliens Visiting Earth (Sp.)

 

 

 

 

O’Leary

Lawfare

Netscape https://twitter.com/i/status/1847827491601482109

Pinion https://twitter.com/i/status/1847670411019911179

Margin https://twitter.com/i/status/1847806428687585451

RFK https://twitter.com/i/status/1847416261312913877

Voting

Broadband https://twitter.com/i/status/1847801842337796565

1M https://twitter.com/i/status/1847858776520687678

 

 

 

 

Coming from a Soros man…

• Market ‘Convinced’ Trump Will Win – Druckenmiller (RT)

Markets have been pricing in a Donald Trump victory in the upcoming US presidential election, American billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller has said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. The founder of the Duquesne Family Office investment firm and hedge fund manager specified that the trend is clearly visible in bank stocks, crypto and even in the performance of the former president’s social media company Trump Media & Technology Group. “I would have to guess Trump is the favorite to win the election,” Druckenmiller told the news channel on Wednesday, emphasizing that the market has seemed “very convinced Trump is going to win” over the past 12 days.

Druckenmiller, who managed money for billionaire political activist and Democrat mega-donor George Soros for more than a decade, also commented on how a Trump victory would play out if the Republicans win Congress. According to him, it’s “extremely unlikely” that the Democrats will gain control of Congress, even if Kamala Harris makes it to the Oval Office. The investor, who funded the primary campaign of former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley against Trump earlier this year, also said that equities may be troubled for three to six months in the event of a so-called blue sweep, when the Democrats win the Presidency, the Senate and the House of representatives. Druckenmiller added that a red sweep scenario is “probably more likely than a Trump presidency with a blue Congress.”

“Personally, I think anybody that votes for Trump is probably not going to change their ballot for a Democrat in Congress,” he added. The money manager also expects the Fed to be far more hawkish than it would be under a Harris administration. He noted that the jumbo rate cut of 50 basis points in September was a mistake, adding that his investment firm shorted bonds, betting that the obligation price would fall, after the announcement. Druckenmiller stressed that the market needs to temper its expectations about the pace and extent of central-bank easing.

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“Your vote will decide whether we give up on America, or whether we save America..”

• Trump Promises To Unleash ‘America’s New Golden Age’ (JTN)

Rising in the polls, former President Donald Trump channeled some Ronald Reagan-like optimism while rallying voters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, promising Saturday evening that if he is elected he would unleash “America’s New Golden Age.” “This election is a choice between whether we will have four more years of failure and disaster, or whether we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country,” Trump told the crowd in Latrobe, Pa. “Your vote will decide whether we give up on America, or whether we save America,” he added. Trump rattled off the policy changes he would sweep into Washington, from tax cuts and regulatory reform to securing the border and shrinking government. “With your support, we will bring back our nation’s strength, dominance, prosperity, and pride,” he said. “This will be America’s New Golden Age. “One hundred years from now, the presidential election of 2024 will be looked upon as America’s greatest victory.”

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“..absent a Republican sweep most of Trump’s promises will end up as being just hot air..”

• Trump Considers No Taxes For Police Officers, Firefighters And Military (ZH)

The race to shock and awe with the greatest number of tax cuts ahead of the November 5 election is nearing its climax. Donald Trump said he’d consider exempting police officers, firefighters, active duty military and veterans from paying taxes, the Republican nominee’s latest campaign trail idea to deliver tax breaks to key groups of supporters. “It’s something I would think about,” Trump said in response to a question about excluding first responders and military members from tax bills on an online show Maintaining with Tyrus that aired Friday. “You’re like my tax person there, but yeah. I mean something has to be done,” he said. “It’s almost an incentive to where you can get people interested.” The idea to exempt members of the military and first responders from taxation is the latest in a long list of tax proposals Trump has talked about while campaigning against Kamala Harris.

He’s pledged to i) eliminate taxes on tipped wages, ii) taxes on overtime pay and iii) taxes on Social Security benefits. To be sure, Trump didn’t give any more details about the service member tax exclusion, and any such ideas would require congressional approval in order to become law, which is why absent a Republican sweep most of Trump’s promises will end up as being just hot air. The no-taxes-on-military-and-first-responders idea could be among the largest new tax cuts he’s discussed to date, exempting more than 20 million people from federal tax payments. According to Bloomberg, there are about 18 million living veterans in the US, roughly 1.3 million active duty troops, approximately 1 million police offers in the US and more than 300,000 professional firefighters, according to several estimates. The US does offer some broad tax exemption to military members, but that is largely limited to people who are serving in active combat zones.

Over the last several months, Trump has rolled out a steady drumbeat of politically beneficial tax cut plans focused on key election constituencies, as a way to appeal to voters in an extremely tight election — particularly, low-and-middle-income Americans frustrated by high prices. The Republican nominee has thrown out such a wide range of tax proposals that even his own advisers are unsure about which ones he intends to enact if elected. Now that it is clear that neither candidate gives a rat’s ass about the war-time US budget deficit which just hit a mindblowing 6% of GDP despite US GDP allegedly growing at a 3%+ rate…… Trump it taking his tax break promises to the limit while also campaigning on extending the tax cut first passed when he was president. Major portions of that law, including lower tax brackets for households and deductions for small businesses, are set to expire at the end of 2025.

Trump has also pledged to further lower the corporate rate to 15% from 21% and expand the state and local tax deduction, a write-off popular in New York and California where Republicans face close House elections to keep their majority in the chamber. Economists have warned that his policy portfolio may balloon the federal debt, adding as much as $15 trillion to the debt over the next decade, according to an estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Trump contends that economic growth and energy production would offset the loss in tax revenue.

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“You’re going to be hit so hard, and I’m going to take those f**king domes right off your head..”

• Trump Claims He Threatened Putin With Strike On Moscow (RT)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has claimed that he threatened to strike Moscow if Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an attack on Ukraine. Asked in a wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday whether he would use military force to respond to a potential blockade of Taiwan by Beijing, Trump said he would not have to, as his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, “respects me and he knows I’m f**king crazy.” Pivoting to Russia, Trump said the same is true of Putin, who he claimed to have an excellent relationship with. He added that at one point, he told him:

“Vladimir, if you go after Ukraine, I am going to hit you so hard, you’re not even going to believe it. I’m going to hit you right in the middle of fricking Moscow… We’re friends. I don’t want to do it, but I have no choice.” According to the former president, Putin reacted with disbelief, saying “no way.” “Way,” Trump responded. “You’re going to be hit so hard, and I’m going to take those f**king domes right off your head,” he reportedly said, apparently referring to the Russian leader’s Kremlin residence. Trump’s term in office expired in early 2021, more than a year before the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.

Putin last spoke with Trump in 2020, according to public records. American journalist Bob Woodward, however, claimed that the two have had “maybe as many as seven” conversations since Trump left the White House. Both the Kremlin and the Trump campaign have denied the claim. The former US president has repeatedly said that the Russia-Ukraine conflict would not have happened had he been in office, and has vowed to end it within 24 hours if elected. While he provided few details on a potential peace plan, his running mate, J.D. Vance, said Trump could start talks with Russia, Ukraine, and European stakeholders to establish a demilitarized zone along the current front line, with Kiev agreeing to stay out of NATO.

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“A potential new Trump administration must act swiftly to hold accountable those who perpetrated anti-Trump scams.”

• In Search of Accountability for Anti-Trump Hoaxes (TON)

It may be premature to start contemplating the implications of a potential Trump victory on November 5. Unfortunately, for certain issues, it may already be too late. This is because time is of the essence when it comes to holding individuals accountable for the numerous frauds and acts of treachery that characterized much of President Trump’s first four years in office. More specifically, federal law has a five-year statute of limitations, preventing prosecution for actions committed more than five years ago. However, urgent accountability is needed to ensure that those who defrauded the American public in their pursuit of Trump do not escape punishment. Democrats and their allies are acutely aware of the five-year time limit.

This is evident in their swift action to prosecute Twitter user Douglas Mackey for creating a meme in 2016 that jokingly encouraged Hillary Clinton voters to text in their votes. As the statute of limitations on Mackey’s “crimes” was set to lapse in 2021, Democrats, aided by “Republican” appointee Seth DuCharme, were locked and loaded to file charges as soon as Biden assumed the presidency. Republicans would do well do follow this example, albeit for actual crimes. Accountability is needed in order to prevent renewed and repeated treachery. We have examined aspects of three separate scams that may still fall within the five-year statute of limitations period by the time Trump assumes office on January 20, 2025, should he win the election.

Russiagate The first area we examined is Russiagate, which, given that it is now almost nine years old, presents unique challenges in terms of holding anyone accountable. Russiagate originated as a Clinton campaign operation in early 2016. Of course, a dirty tricks campaign is not a crime in itself. Even lying to the media, as the Clinton campaign did repeatedly in its attempts to smear Trump as a Russian agent, is not a crime. Instead, our focus is on government actors. The first documented instance of government actors co-opting the Russiagate narrative occurred when the FBI received the fraudulent Steele dossier on July 5, 2016. This was soon followed by various other actions, such as opening the sham Crossfire Hurricane investigation and spying on several members of the Trump campaign team. However, all these actions are now over eight years old and fall outside the statute of limitations. Unfortunately, even the most egregious aspect of the Russiagate hoax—the fraudulent Intelligence Community Assessment that President Obama used to undermine the incoming Trump administration—also falls outside the statute of limitations. Subsequent actions involving corrupt FBI officials, such as Peter Strzok, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, likewise fall outside the statute of limitations. In fact, all these individuals were fired more than five years ago.[..]

Ukraine Impeachment Hoax It is not coincidental that Trump’s first impeachment, on charges of allegedly failing to send weapons to Ukraine, began one day after Robert Mueller testified before Congress that there was no Russian collusion. One hoax simply replaced another. On July 25, 2019, Trump had his infamous conversation with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky. The overarching premise of the impeachment scheme was to accuse Trump of withholding military aid to Ukraine, despite the fact that he had not done so. This allegation stemmed from a distorted interpretation of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky. It was claimed that Trump had offered a quid pro quo, suggesting that Zelensky investigate alleged corruption involving the Biden family in exchange for military assistance. However, when the actual transcript of the phone call was released in September 2019, it became clear that this characterization was false. Nevertheless, by that time, the impeachment narrative against Trump was already in full swing, and neither the Democrats nor the media were deterred by the truth.

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“..in the US people are starting to realize that the legacy media is just a propaganda machine..”

• Americans Getting Wise To ‘Propaganda Machine’ – Musk (RT)

A victory for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris could usher in a crackdown on freedom of speech in the US, tech billionaire Elon Musk has warned. Speaking at a rally for Republican candidate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the Tesla and X CEO was asked what kind of administration he would expect to see from Harris if she wins the November election. “We’ll see a lot of censorship under a sort of Kamala regime. Kamala is really just a puppet, frankly. If the teleprompter breaks she doesn’t know what to say,” Musk said, adding that he prefers to think of the administration as a “big government machine” that puts on a certain face to appeal to voters. In contrast, the tycoon said he finds claims that Trump is “a danger to democracy” to be “bizarre and hypocritical,” given that US President Joe Biden was “removed” from the race in an “incredibly undemocratic” fashion.

“There’s clearly a strong a strong push for censorship under the guise of fighting disinformation. But disinformation is really a propaganda word. Who’s going to decide what disinformation is? The government? That’s crazy,” Musk stated. However, the billionaire said he remains optimistic about a shift in the national mindset – as more Americans refuse to believe “everything the media tells you.” “Actually, in the US people are starting to realize that the legacy media is just a propaganda machine,” he argued, while the European audience “still thinks the news is real.” In June 2022, Harris spearheaded the creation of the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, with a focus on protecting women and the LGBTQ community.

In 2019, the US vice president labeled social media platforms as purveyors of “hate” and “misinformation” and said she wanted to hold them accountable for the content they spread. Musk has repeatedly criticized the US government for overreach and attempts to introduce what he sees as excessive content moderation. While the mogul previously positioned himself as politically neutral, he publicly endorsed Donald Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July, donating tens of millions of dollars to his campaign. The Republican, if he wins, has promised to create a new government post called ‘secretary of cost-cutting’ tailored specifically for Musk.

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“..you desperately decide to call him all the bad names at once.”

• The Atlantic Mocked For ‘Trump Is Hitler’ Hit-Piece (RT)

The Atlantic magazine and its staff writer Anne Applebaum have faced widespread criticism after publishing an op-ed that compares former US President Donald Trump to infamous dictators like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini. The article, which claims Trump is borrowing rhetoric from some of the 20th century’s most notorious leaders, has been ridiculed online, particularly by pro-Trump commenters and political figures. Some have also drawn attention to Applebaum’s links to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout. The controversy erupted after Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a member of the board of NED, argued that Trump’s use of terms like “vermin” to describe his opponents and his references to “criminal illegal immigrants as animals” echoed the dehumanizing language of the named dictators.

The headline of her article –”Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini– ignited a flurry of backlash. The Trump campaign dismissed the piece as “fake news by a third-rate media outlet,” while figures on social media openly mocked Applebaum and the magazine. Among the first to respond was journalist Glenn Greenwald, who commented, “When you spend eight years calling a person every bad name you can think of—including Hitler—and it doesn’t work, so you desperately decide to call him all the bad names at once.” Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, also ridiculed the piece, responding with “I can’t stop laughing.” British conservative commenter Ben Kew chimed in as well, mocking The Atlantic’s editorial process: “I love the idea that the editors sat around and thought, ‘Let’s come up with a headline for Anne Applebaum’s piece that will really scare the average voter.’”

Critics of Applebaum also pointed to her connections to the NED, a government-funded organization with links to US intelligence operations. Applebaum’s critics, including journalist Mike Benz, accused her of pushing a pro-intelligence agenda. “Anne Applebaum is on the board of directors for the most notorious CIA cut-out in US history,” Benz stated, suggesting her opinion pieces often align with US national security interests. NED is funded by the US State Department to do, in the words of its founder, Carl Gershman, what “was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In recent years, the NED helped foment the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, sponsored meetings of anti-Beijing officials and delegates in Taiwan, and financed a UK-based organization working to drive right-wing American news outlets out of business.

Her published opinions and those of the US national security state rarely diverge. Writing for the Atlantic, she has advocated regime change in Russia, accused Trump of planning to “abandon” Ukraine and NATO, and accused Musk of “weakness” and “arrogance” over his refusal to help Kiev’s forces guide kamikaze drones into Russian naval targets in Crimea. Despite her prominent role at NED, she has denied any personal links to the CIA. Nonetheless, critics highlight the close alignment of her views with US foreign policy initiatives. The Atlantic has yet to respond to the widespread backlash against the article.

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“It is a federal crime to pay people with the intention of inducing or rewarding them to cast a vote or to get registered, an offense punishable by prison time.”

• Elon Musk Launches Million-Dollar-A-Day Giveaway For Petition Signers (ZH)

Elon Musk continued his town hall tour through the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday evening, this time in the working-class town of Harrisburg. Speaking to thousands packed inside a megachurch – formerly AMP Incorporated’s headquarters – Musk walked onto the stage with rock-n-roll blasting in the background. Almost immediately, he announced a $1 million-a-day giveaway. The promotion began on Saturday night. It runs until November’s election and is open to anyone who signs his online petition supporting the US Constitution. “One of the challenges we’re having is, like, how do we get people to know about this petition?” Musk told the audience of blue-collar workers, many of whom were youngsters with families, adding, “This news, I think, is going to really fly.” On X, Musk wrote, “The goal of the $1M/day prize is to maximize awareness of our petition to support The Constitution.”

Musk’s political action organization, America PAC, has been responsible for the town hall events and will be doling out a million dollars daily to anyone who signs the petition. X user DogeDesigner noted, “Elon Musk really knows how to get legacy media to promote for free.” The petition Musk has asked people to sign reads: “The First and Second Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. By signing below, I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.” “Our goal is to get 1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. This program is exclusively open to registered voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Expires October 21,” the petition said.

Google Trends data shows that searches for “Elon Musk petition” have surged nationwide. The Wall Street Journal commented on Musk’s announcement: “It is a federal crime to pay people with the intention of inducing or rewarding them to cast a vote or to get registered, an offense punishable by prison time.” According to OpenSecrets, America PAC has spent more than $119 million during the 2024 election cycle. Meanwhile…

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“..paving the way for both nations to step up their military drills near Russia’s borders..”

• Germany and UK To Sign ‘Historic’ Defense Pact – Sunday Times (RT)

The UK and Germany will sign a bilateral defense agreement this week, paving the way for both nations to step up their military drills near Russia’s borders, The Sunday Times has reported. Under the terms of the deal, Britain and Germany will cooperate on arms procurement and development, with the agreement serving as a “first step” for a larger deal between the UK and EU next year, the British newspaper reported. The pact “is expected to enable British and German forces to conduct joint military exercises on NATO’s eastern border with Russia, most probably in Estonia and Lithuania,” The Times noted, without offering further explanation.

Britain and Germany already take part in NATO exercises, such as this year’s ‘Steadfast Defender’ drills. Conducted near Russia’s western borders, ‘Steadfast Defender’ involved 90,000 troops from all 32 NATO states, and was perceived in Moscow as open preparation for “a potential armed clash with Russia.” In addition to these multilateral exercises, Germany already takes part in smaller-scale bilateral exercises, such as Germany’s ‘Grand Quadriga’ drills with Lithuania earlier this year, and its ‘Baltic Tiger’ maneuvers with Estonia in 2022. The Times’ article suggests that Britain could join these exercises once the new deal is signed.

British Defense Secretary John Healey told the newspaper that the deal is modeled on the 2010 Lancaster House agreement between the UK and France. Under this agreement, Britain and France pledge to create a joint expeditionary force to take part in military drills, to collaborate on developing drones and submarine technology, and to share nuclear-weapons data with each other. During a two-day NATO summit in Brussels this week, Healey also announced that British troops stationed in Estonia will receive new drone warfare equipment and training, and that the UK will work with Germany, France, Poland and Italy to create new long-range missiles for Ukraine.

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..“fear of war in Europe” was the top concern (81%) of young Germans..”

• Germany’s Scholz Shoots Down Ukraine’s ‘Victory Plan’ (RT)

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has poured cold water on Vladimir Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’, refusing to acquiesce to some of its key points. He argued that the EU has a responsibility to ensure that the conflict in Ukraine does not become a war between Russia and NATO. On Wednesday, Zelensky presented his vision to the Ukrainian parliament, acknowledging that its success largely depends on Kiev’s Western backers. The plan consists of eight points, three of which are classified. Among the publicly disclosed points are a demand that Ukraine be immediately admitted into NATO. Secondly, Kiev wants its Western backers to lift all restrictions on the use of long-range missiles, including strikes against targets deep inside Russia’s internationally recognized territory.

Speaking to reporters following the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday, Scholz said that “Germany’s stance on the issues that are touched upon” in Zelensky’s plan remain the same. The chancellor added that it is his duty to prevent the Ukraine conflict from escalating into a full-blown war between NATO and Russia. With respect to Ukraine’s repeated requests for German-made Taurus long-range missiles, Scholz reiterated that he did not “deem this the right supply – and this still holds.” The German chancellor also put the brakes on Zelensky’s demand for fast-track NATO membership, pointing to the bloc’s July summit in Washington where proponents of quick membership were not able to convince skeptics, including the US and Germany. According to Scholz, the general consensus reached at the gathering was merely that Ukraine was irreversibly on its way to full membership at some unspecified point in the future when certain conditions were met.

Earlier this month, the German media reported that Zelesnky had attempted to make Scholz change his mind during the Ukrainian leader’s European tour last week, but failed. Commenting on Zelensky’s plan on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed it as a “set of incoherent slogans” and a “plan for the misfortune of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, for his part, called on the Ukrainian leadership to “sober up.” Against this backdrop, a recently published survey by the British multinational oil and gas company Shell indicated that “fear of war in Europe” was the top concern (81%) of young Germans.

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“Putin understands that war between Washington and Russia means end times, and he wants to avoid that at all costs..”

• Is Russia Finally Acknowledging Reality? (Paul Craig Roberts)

I see Putin as a successful leader. He has rescued Russia from demoralization from the Soviet collapse, which resulted in a once powerful state being dismembered, looted and embarrassed by its Jewish oligarchs and Washington. Putin has rebuilt the Russian economy, despite Washington’s sanctions and Putin’s incompetent central bank director. Putin has restored Russian pride, the Russian family, and civil morality. He is a rare successful leader. But as a war leader he has been Putin the Unready, caught off guard by the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia organized by Washington, by Washington’s overthrow of the Ukrainian government, and by the West’s response to his Special Military Operation in Donbas. Putin has accepted insult after insult, provocation after provocation, thus ever-widening the conflict and inviting more conflicts elsewhere as in the Middle East.

It is unclear to me why Putin accepted Washington’s overthrow of the Ukrainian government. Did he simply lack the military resources to prevent it, or was he unable to understand what was happening? The conflict that occurred 8 years later was the consequence of Putin’s failure to read the writing on the wall. Perhaps he was constrained by the treasonous class, the worshipers of the West, traitors I refer to as “Atlanticist Integrationists.” These traitors are now referred to in Russia as “the Fifth Column.” For the most part they are gone, except for the Russian central bank director, who continues to do Russia more harm than the West does. I think the explanation of Putin’s behavior is that Putin understands that war between Washington and Russia means end times, and he wants to avoid that at all costs. Thus, his willingness to accept endless insults and provocations.

But what Putin does not seem to understand is that Washington is relentless in its efforts to impose its agenda of Washington’s hegemony, and that Russia, China and Iran are obstacles in the way of this agenda and, therefore, are to be eliminated. Putin might regard such an agenda as preposterous, but it is nevertheless the agenda. Washington is yet to announce the abandonment of the Wolfowitz Doctrine of American hegemony and unilateralism. As long as this is Washington’s agenda, no understanding signed with Washington has any meaning. As long as Putin continues to accept Washington’s aggression, the aggression will continue. Putin’s acceptance of provocations have gone so far that the West no longer believes his threats. Both the outgoing and incoming NATO Secretary Generals said that we need pay no attention to whatever Putin says as he never means it. Did Putin understand that this was the price of endlessly accepting provocations? Did he understand that he was destroying the credibility of his warnings?

Putin, trying to avoid war, has repeated the same mistake in the Middle East. I was heartened when suddenly Putin showed proactive capability and quickly moved the Russian Air Force into Syria, thus preventing the American war criminal, Obama, from invading Syria. I concluded, wrongly, that Russia had decided to bring Washington’s aggression to a halt. But it was only a one time deal. Putin, trying to avoid war by leaving Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah without air protection, achieved the opposite–the onset of war. Now, according to reports, Putin is scrambling to get air protection to Iran before Israel blows up Iran’s peaceful nuclear reactors, thus spreading radiation over wide areas of Russia. Putin and the Russian General Staff failed to comprehend what happens in the absence of countervailing power. The result is not a damper put on war but the outbreak of war, with Putin now having to issue hard warnings to Israel, warnings that might have no credibility in light of Putin’s past failure to enforce red lines.

Awareness is descending on Russia that the existence of Ukraine as an independent country is an existential threat to Russia. The liberation of Donbas does not demilitarize and deNazify Ukraine or replace Ukraine’s puppet government with an independent one. Will the Russian public and the Russian General Staff permit Putin to agree to end the war simply on the basis of the liberation of Donbas, or will the Russian public and the General Staff insist that Ukraine’s existence is an existential threat to Russia’s existence and insist that the war continue until Ukraine is again a province of Russia? The Russian Fifth Column is busy at work disputing Zbigniew Brzezinski’s conclusion that Russia cannot be a great power if Ukraine is not part of Russia’s sphere of influence. Will the General Staff and the Russian population agree with the Fifth Column or with Brzezinski? If they agree with Brzezinski, they will object to Putin merely kicking the can down the road with a peace deal. It will be unfortunate if Putin’s insistence on peace destabilizes Russia.

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“..SpaceX dominates rocket launches and leads the space race in this solar system..”

• Boeing Explores Asset Sales In Potential Shrinking Of Corporate Footprint (ZH)

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday morning that Boeing is mulling over asset sales to raise cash levels for its struggling business. On Saturday, Boeing and union heads reached a tentative labor contract agreement that could soon end the money-draining months-long labor strike, while early last week, the planemaker filed a $25 billion shelf registration to provide a “variety of capital options as needed to support the company’s balance sheet over a three-year period.” The new report cites a person familiar with a recent discussion between Boeing’s board and executives at its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The meeting centered around potential asset sales, as executives and board members combed through internal reports on the state of each of the planemaker’s units.

Just weeks ago, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told employees, “We need to be clear-eyed about the work we face,” adding, “We also need to focus our resources on performing and innovating in the areas that are core to who we are.” Ortberg replaced Dave Calhoun as the president and CEO of Boeing on August 8. He is expected to comment publicly for the first time as CEO on Wednesday, following the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ vote on the new labor contract. The company estimated the strike to cost $1 billion. It warned of a $6 billion quarterly loss for the period ending September 30. On Tuesday, just days after Boeing announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce due to intensifying financial pressure, such as dwindling cash reserves and mounting risk of a credit downgrade, as well as prolonged strike, the beleaguered planemaker filed a $25 billion shelf registration.

“This universal shelf registration provides flexibility for the company to seek a variety of capital options as needed to support the company’s balance sheet over a three-year period,” Boeing wrote in the filing. Separately, Boeing entered into a $10 billion “supplemental credit agreement” with a consortium of lenders. It noted that the credit facility provides “additional short-term access to liquidity as we navigate through a challenging environment,” adding that it has not drawn down on this facility or its existing credit revolver. Boeing has already considered selling its rocket-launching joint venture, United Launch Alliance, with Lockheed Martin to Sierra Space for $2-$3 billion. Also, Boeing’s space division is in crisis following the malfunctioning of the Starliner spacecraft.

Separately, Boeing’s competitor, Airbus, laid off 2,500 jobs in its space division, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX dominates rocket launches and leads the space race in this solar system. Boeing’s obsession (Wall Street’s obsession) with DEI, climate, and gender justice ultimately dealt the fatal blow. It’s time to refocus on the fundamentals, like building planes that actually stay in the sky. Is that a hard ask, Boeing?

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“There is no lawsuit that could do the damage that the mainstream media is doing to itself..”

• No, Trump Should Not Sue CBS (Turley)

In an interview with podcast host Dan Bongino, former President Trump said he “thinks” he will sue CBS after it was found to have edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, only the latest such allegation against mainstream media. I hope that he will think again about this latest threat of litigation. I agree with the criticism of the media, including CBS, in the bias shown in the election. However, such a lawsuit would be legally groundless, in my view. If it is any solace, the media is doing enough damage to itself. Many have criticized CBS for its editing of the interview with journalist Bill Whitaker after the network shortened portions of Harris’s answer to a question about the war in Gaza in its initial broadcast. It later provided a full transcript of her remarks online. (For full disclosure, I worked twice under contract with CBS as a legal analyst).

Trump, however, took the matter further in his interview, stating, “[s]o I think I’m going to sue them actually. I think so. No, you know what, they can’t defend it and if they do and even if they win it’s going to be very embarrassing.” Such a lawsuit would fail. The media is allowed to engage in such editing. Indeed, bias itself is not generally actionable. Moreover, there were moments where Whitaker did press Harris in sharp contrast to most of her interviews on shows like The View, Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show, as well as on Late Night with Stephen Colbert. There were some tough moments where Whitaker pushed Harris to give more than soundbite answers. I have been a vocal critic of the mainstream media for its embracing of what I refer to as “advocacy journalism” in my book, The Indispensable Right.

Many in this country view mainstream media as a de facto state media due to the bias shown against Trump and for Democratic talking points. Indeed, the mantra “Let’s Go Brandon!” was embraced by millions as a criticism of the media as much as it was a criticism of President Biden. However, the threats of harassing lawsuits destroys any moral high ground for Trump. It is also entirely unnecessary. As I wrote this weekend, “journalism has become a ship of fools who increasingly write for each other rather than the dwindling numbers of actual readers.”

CBS was widely criticized for the performance of Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan as moderators in the presidential debate. That includes reneging on a pledge not to “fact check” and showing manifest bias in their treatment of the candidates. Television and print outlets are experiencing a sharp decline in revenue and audiences across the industry. As discussed in this weekend’s column, the public is going elsewhere for news. Trust in the media is at a record low. There is no lawsuit that could do the damage that the mainstream media is doing to itself.

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“You can cut back on the fraudulent rackets, or you can cut back on the people.” They are cutting back on the people..”

• Gold, Kamala, Trump, Control, Cash, Murder, Water – Austin Fitts (USAW)

Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), Publisher of The Solari Report, financial expert and former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Admin.), gives her take on gold, Kamala, Trump, control, cash, murder and water. On gold’s rocket rise, CAF says, “Gold is very important. We divide gold into two positions: Your ‘core’ position and your ‘investment’ position. . . . Right now, gold looks phenomenally attractive as a core position. It is also attractive as an investment position.” Why the big move up now? CAF says, “Part of it is the incredible monetary policies and the monetary inflation coming from the central banks. The other is too many people are watching government implode in a variety of different ways, and people are saying I want a core position in gold.

We are also seeing the BRICs . . . and seeing states in the US move to put gold and silver in a position to be used as a currency. So, we are watching people put monetary reserves in gold and monetary liquidity in gold. That is happening steadily, and more and more people are saying they need a percentage of their assets in gold. . . . We are in a long-term bull market in gold.” On Kamala Harris, the operative word is “meltdown.” CAF says, “Kamala is in, what we call in a campaign, a ‘meltdown.’ If you look at the current meltdown, I am baffled because why would somebody with her characteristics be made the nominee? You are talking about major donors putting major money behind her. Why would they spend that much money if there were serious holes in her vetting and she is inclined to melt down this way? It’s kind of baffling.”

On Trump, what is the first thing he should do if re-elected? CAF says, “He should stop the poisoning of the American people. This is one of the reasons we did this issue on water. The American people are being poisoned. . . . I travel a lot by car. I see deterioration in the air, in the water, in the food–they are being poisoned. And, of course, the big one is the CV19 vaccines. Vaccines are poisoning Americans. There was just a big ruling against putting fluoride poison being added to municipal water supplies. One of the things you can do is to march down to your city or county and tell them to stop wasting money on putting poison in your water. If you reverse that, it is one important action you can take.”

The Deep State and central bankers want total control of your money and your life. Fitts says this is why she started pushing the use of cash instead of digital transactions. She calls it “Make Cash Great Again.” . . . If we don’t fix the finances from an actuarial standpoint, they are going to continue to delay benefits or lower life expectancy, and that is what they are doing. They are balancing the books by lowering life expectancy.” One way to lower life expectancy is to inject people with a so-called vaccine that is really a bioweapon that murders and disables people. That is exactly what happened with the CV19 vax, and the deaths or murders are still piling up. CAF says, “You can cut back on the fraudulent rackets, or you can cut back on the people.” They are cutting back on the people by any measure.

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“..it’s beyond horrendous, it’s beyond comprehension.”

• ‘It’s Like We’re Watching Auschwitz on TikTok’ (Gabor Maté)

Had there been YouTube and Instagram and TikTok around Auschwitz, this is what we would have seen, people burning alive. And it’s beyond horrendous, it’s beyond comprehension.” In an online meeting with French activist and film producer Frank Barat on Monday, Canadian physician Gabor Mate explored the psychological complexities of witnessing atrocities in Gaza and Palestine, saying: “It’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok.” They delve into the emotional and historical roots of violence and oppression, highlighting the trauma, guilt, and helplessness experienced by observers. Mate stresses the need to acknowledge these emotions and examines the normalisation of violence, while contemplating the future implications for Gaza and global society.

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“..looking after his children and his wife and building an understanding of his family and these… new circumstances of freedom..”

• Julian Would Not Have Survived Without Plea Deal – Assange’s Father (RT)

John Shipton, the father of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, has spoken to RT about his son’s plea deal with the US and what the publisher has been doing since regaining his freedom four months ago. Assange spent five years in a high-security prison in the UK as he fought extradition to the US, which had accused him of unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified information, much of which related to American war crimes. In June, he struck a plea bargain with the US Justice Department, formally acknowledging some guilt and waiving his right to legal recourse in exchange for freedom. “I pled guilty to journalism,” the Wikileaks founder explained later. Speaking of his son’s ordeal, Shipton – who is currently visiting Russia – told RT on Saturday that “the US, in its pursuit of those that it does not like, is clearly quite ruthless and vindictive.”

“I imagine if not for the intercession of the Australian government, the Australian people and the Australian parliament, if not for that intercession [which made the plea deal possible], Julian would not have survived,” he stressed. Shipton gave his interview in Moscow alongside Mira Terada, a Russian journalist who was extradited to the US from Finland in late 2010s on accusations of money laundering and spent 46 months in an American prison. Assange’s father arrived to Moscow on the invitation of Terada, who is now co-chair of the BRICS Journalists Association. Being in a US prison is “the worst experience” a human being can have, Terada insisted. “It is a human rights violation from the moment when they kidnap you to the moment when they release you,” she said, adding that inmates are being subject to both physical and psychological torture.

“I am confident that he [Assange] would never have a fair trial [in the US], but it is a big question if he would make it alive till the trial,” she said. Shipton recalled that he was “elated” when Assange was released from prison, saying that “a great burden had been lifted from myself and many hundreds of thousands of people, who ardently fought for Julian’s freedom for many years.” Some of those activists – in the UK, Germany, France, Russia, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and South America – became “rather like an extended family” to us, he added. According to Assange’s father, he “did not use hope as a tool for energy” when his son remained behind bars, but relied on “faith that the people of the world would object fundamentally to the site of an injustice and move towards righting that and bringing about justice.”

“I do not have fears” about Julian Assange’s future at the moment, Shipton said. “I think the arrangements that the diplomats and lawyers have made with the US are substantial enough to allow Julian to live a normal life.” The Wikileaks co-founder is now busy “looking after his children and his wife and building an understanding of his family and these… new circumstances of freedom,” he said. Assange is “a voracious reader and very curious. So I imagine that he is furthering his knowledge in the areas of his interests, which are vast.” When asked about whether his son is planning to return to journalism, Shipton replied: “I have no way of answering that question.”

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All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

• Pentagon Says There is No Hard Evidence of Aliens Visiting Earth (Sp.)

Pentagon Press Secretary Major General Patrick Ryder this week made it clear exactly what the US military reportedly knows about aliens’ alleged visits to Earth. “The truth is out there, Jeff, and the truth is we have no evidence to indicate extraterrestrial life has visited the planet,” he told Task and Purpose reporter Jeff Schogol during a press event on Thursday, when the latter asked him what the Pentagon knows about aliens and UFOs. Ryder’s revelations can hardly be considered a novelty as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), set up specifically to investigate UFOs (or UAPs as they are often referred to today) and other inexplicable phenomena, said as much in a report released back in March.

“To date, AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the US government and private companies have access to or have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology,” Maj. Gen. Ryder said in a statement issued on March 8. “Also, AARO has found no evidence that any US government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.” Ryder also pointed out at the time that “all investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification.”

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Matrix

 

 

Casey Means

 

 

Dough

 

 

Ivy

 

 

Bai Cai

 

 

No way

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Oct 162024
 
 October 16, 2024  Posted by at 9:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  57 Responses »


Peter Stackpole Sophia Loren in a Manhattan Coffee, NYC 1958

 

Trump Promises Government Position For Musk (RT)
California Gov’t Blocks New Musk Rocket Launches, Citing Trump Support (JTN)
Staying In Touch With Putin Would Be ‘Smart’ – Trump (RT)
Hungary Publicly Backs Trump (RT)
Fani Willis Tries To Block Nathan Wade From Testifying To Congress (JTN)
Walzing Around Free Speech (Turley)
Zelensky Wants West To Fight Russia – Exiled Ukrainian Opposition Leader (RT)
‘Elite’ Ukrainian Troops Surrender In Kursk Region – Chechen Commander (RT)
The Road to War (Paul Craig Roberts)
This Will Destroy the Dollar (Jim Rickards)
Emirates Flags ‘Serious Talks’ With Boeing (RT)
Trust in US News Media Hits Record Low – Gallup (RT)
British Government’s Novichok Trial Reveals A Toxic Shock (Helmer)
Druzhba: Oil Mega-Pipeline That Evaded US Sabotage (Sp.)

 

 

This goes fast!

 

 

Twitter/X videos don’t embed properly. Hope that is temporary.

 

 

PA mail-in

O’Keefe

Youngkin

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We’ll have a new position: secretary of cost-cutting. Elon wants to do that..”

• Trump Promises Government Position For Musk (RT)

Former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump has promised to create a new office specifically for SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk should he win the November election. The presidential hopeful made the remarks as he appeared on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. Trump praised the billionaire as a “great business guy” and a “great cost-cutter,” floating a possible White House role for him. “You think of him for science and rockets and every time he’s telling me about a new screw that was developed. He’s developed a new screw. Screws are difficult and it’s made out of titanium and it’s so exciting,” Trump stated. “We’ll have a new position: secretary of cost-cutting. Elon wants to do that, and we have incredible people. He’s running a big business,” he added, claiming Musk has already shown interest in taking such a role.

Trump also spoke about Musk’s ambitious space plans, stating the latter had promised him to “get to Mars before the end of my administration, which will be long before, hopefully, China or Russia.” Musk has long been an open backer of Trump and has repeatedly made bold statements in support of the Republican. Earlier this month, he made a surprise appearance at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, calling the November vote “the most important election of our lifetime” and claiming the opposing side “wants to take away your freedom of speech.” Separately, Musk attacked those fellow billionaires who are backing Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, suggesting they were “terrified” of a potential Trump victory given that many of them were likely on the Jeffrey Epstein client list. Trump suggested that Epstein’s “black book” could be made public if he wins the election.

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SpaceX is what Boeing and NASA once were.

• California Gov’t Blocks New Musk Rocket Launches, Citing Trump Support (JTN)

The California government denied an Air Force request to allow Elon Musk’s SpaceX to increase its California rocket launches, citing Musk’s politics. The Department of Defense and a large bipartisan coalition of lawmakers endorsed the launch expansion, with some center-left housing activists attacking the vote as no different than the California Coastal Commission’s consistent denial of housing. The Air Force and Space Force had requested that the California Coastal Commission allow SpaceX to increase its annual permitted launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara from 36 to 50. “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” said Commissioner Gretchen Newsom at the meeting. “I really appreciate the work of the Space Force,” said Commission Chair Caryl Hart at the meeting.

“But here we’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race and he’s managed a company in a way that was just described by Commissioner Newsom that I find to be very disturbing.” The bipartisan Congressional coalition signing a letter of support included a wide range of members of Congress, from leading Democrats Pete Aguilar, D-Redlands, and Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, to Republicans Michelle Steel, R-Fountain Valley, and Darrel Issa, R-San Diego. Creating a reason beyond political considerations, Commissioner Dayne Bocho said, “I do believe that the Space Force has failed to establish that SpaceX is a part of the federal government, part of our defense.” NASA currently does not have any of its own active vehicles for transporting goods or humans to space, and must rely either on Russia, or on American commercial partners such as SpaceX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Boeing’s Starliner was sent to space in June for its first manned mission to the International Space Station. The eight day mission has now turned into an eight month mission due to the Starliner capsule being deemed unsafe to bring the astronauts home; soon thereafter, one Russian Soyuz capsule went to the station, after which NASA sent up a SpaceX Dragon capsule to carry back the stranded astronauts. Boeing, which has outsourced (and significantly offshored) 70% of its design, engineering, and manufacturing, has lost $33 billion over the past five years following reliability concerns and two fatal crashes of its new, best-selling 737 Max 8 plane due to design, maintenance, and training-related issues. As noted by conservative leaders, Musk cited the state’s policies — specifically its new rule banning parental notification for gender change requests from K-12 students — for his official relocation of X, formerly known as Twitter, and SpaceX to Texas.

“First Newsom drove SpaceX to move its headquarters out of California,” said Congressman Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, on X. “Now, his Coastal Commission is denying their launch plan because the commissioners don’t like Elon’s political posts.” First Amendment advocates wondered how it was legal to consider Musk’s legally protected political speech in its regulatory actions. “While the commission can consider the nature of SpaceX’s activities and their environmental impact, the First Amendment forbids government agencies from leveraging regulatory power to stifle protected speech,” said the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a pro-First Amendment legal nonprofit, in a statement. “That was true when Florida’s government punished Disney for opposing Gov. Ron DeSantis’s education policies, it was true when a New York agency leaned on insurance companies to cut ties with the NRA because of its political advocacy, and it’s true here.”

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“If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing..”

• Staying In Touch With Putin Would Be ‘Smart’ – Trump (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has refused to confirm or deny contacting Russian President Vladimir Putin since leaving office in 2021, but said that doing so would have been “a smart thing.” Trump has repeatedly vowed to use his “great relationship” with Putin to end the Ukraine conflict if he is elected next month. American journalist Bob Woodward’s latest book, ‘War’, which was published this week, claims that Trump secretly spoke to Putin seven times since leaving office in 2021, and sent Russia Covid-19 testing equipment in 2020, while he was still president. Trump’s campaign initially declared that “none of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true,” but in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait on Tuesday, the former president struck a more ambiguous tone.

“I don’t comment on that, but I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing,” Trump told Mickelthwait. “If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing, in terms of a country…he’s got 2,000 nuclear weapons and so do we.” Trump maintains that the Ukraine conflict never would have begun if he had won the 2020 election, and that President Joe Biden’s “stupid words” antagonized Putin into launching his offensive in February 2022. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ promise of open-ended support for Ukraine risks dragging the US into “World War III,” he has repeatedly declared. After meeting Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky last month, Trump boasted that he had a “very good relationship” with both Zelensky and Putin and promised to “get [the Ukraine conflict] resolved very quickly” if he wins November’s election.

According to his running mate, J.D. Vance, Trump would likely start talks with Russia, Ukraine, and European stakeholders to establish a demilitarized zone along the current front line, with Ukraine agreeing to stay out of NATO The Kremlin has cast doubt on Trump’s promises of peace, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggesting that he does not “think there is a magic wand” that can stop the fighting overnight. Peskov confirmed last week that Trump did indeed send Covid-19 tests to Russia in 2020.. “But about the phone calls – it’s not true,” he added.

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“They already had great cooperation during Trump’s presidential term. Since then, they have maintained this relationship..”

• Hungary Publicly Backs Trump (RT)

A victory for Donald Trump in the upcoming US presidential election would be the best outcome for Hungary, the country’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in an interview with RIA Novosti on Tuesday. Budapest will respect the choice of US voters regardless, he added. Szijjarto had previously said US-Hungarian relations were strongest when Trump was in the White House and that Trump’s reelection would improve the chances of securing peace in the world. “We are very proud of the fact that President Trump usually refers to his friendly relationship with [Hungarian] Prime Minister [Viktor] Orban,” Szijjarto said. “The two of them enjoy a great relationship both on a personal and professional basis. They already had great cooperation during Trump’s presidential term. Since then, they have maintained this relationship,” he revealed.

The Hungarian foreign minister went on to say: “If I look at the US elections from the Hungarian angle … it would be much better for us if Trump were elected by the Americans. “On the other hand, I would like to stress that, since we are not American citizens, we always respect the results of the elections in the United States, regardless of the outcome. We try to build the best relationship because this shows respect for the will of the American people,” Szijjarto concluded. Orban and Trump established close relations during the latter’s presidency, and the Hungarian leader has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Republican’s current campaign, saying earlier this month that he would “open several bottles of champagne” if Trump were elected. Both have also advocated for a swift diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict, and Orban has said on more than one occasion that there would be a greater chance of reaching a peace deal if Trump were to win.

Meanwhile, Szijjarto had earlier denounced the US Democratic Party’s nominee Kamala Harris over her comments regarding the Hungarian prime minister. Last week, during an appearance with Stephen Collbert on CBS News, Harris was asked about Trump’s relationship with world leaders, including Orban, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In response, the US vice president described them as “dictators, autocrats, and people who could rightly be called killers.” Szijjarto said later: “This is outrageous. It’s unacceptable to speak about my prime minister in such a manner. It shows a complete lack of respect for him and the Hungarian people.” He also suggested that such words were “definitely not the best start” for any future relations. The latest polls show the Democratic and Republican nominees locked in a dead heat with less than a month to go. Election day is November 5, although early voting by mail has already started in some states.

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He knows too much.

• Fani Willis Tries To Block Nathan Wade From Testifying To Congress (JTN)

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is seeking to block former special prosecutor Nathan Wade from testifying before Congress, arguing he might “improperly divulge confidential information.” In a letter released Monday to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio., the Georgia attorney said that Wade’s testimony could violate protected privileges that are upheld by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office. “I am concerned that your demand for Mr. Wade’s testimony would force him to improperly divulge confidential information that is protected by privileges held by the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office and demands that Mr. Wade violates State Bar of Georgia rules that govern conduct of attorneys,” the letter reads. Republicans reacted angrily, suggesting a coverup. “What is she trying to hide,” the committee’s GOP majority asked on its official X account.

The letter was written on Oct. 11 and the House Judiciary Committee released it on the social media platform, X on Monday. A GOP-led U.S. House panel subpoenaed Wade as part of an investigation into his romantic relationship with Willis. Last year Willis indicted former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants over their efforts to challenge the 2020 election results in Georgia. A Trump co-defendant tried to have Willis removed upon learning she and Wade, whom she appointed as special prosecutor in the case, had a romantic relationship. Among the arguments was that Willis financially benefited from the deal, considering, in part, Wade was paying for them to take romantic vacations together out of the funds he was paid in the case. Willis requested in the letter to Jordan that he retract his request for Wade to testify.

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“..Now the public is being asked to vote for the most anti-free speech ticket in centuries..”

• Walzing Around Free Speech (Turley)

On Sunday, Walz’s dance partner was Fox News host Shannon Bream, who seemed to be fighting vertigo as the candidate tried to deflect his shocking prior statements on free speech. Bream asked Walz about his prior declaration that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech”— a statement that runs counter to decades of Supreme Court decisions. Walz notably did not deny or retract his statement. Instead, his interview ironically became itself a flagrant example of misinformation. First of all, misinformation and hate speech are not exceptions to the First Amendment: Whether it is the cross burnings of infamous figures like KKK leader Clarence Brandenburg or the Nazis who marched in Skokie, Ill., hate speech is protected. Yet both Harris and Walz are true believers in the righteousness of censorship for disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.

The Biden administration defines misinformation as “false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm” — meaning it would subject you to censorship even if you are not intending harm. It defines malinformation as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” So you can post “true facts,” but would still be subject to censorship if you are viewed as misleading others with your pesky truth-telling. Furthermore, “book bans” are not equivalent to the Harris-Walz censorship policies. After years of supporting censorship and blacklisting, Democrats are attempting to deflect questions by claiming that the GOP is the greater threat. “We’re seeing censorship coming in the form of book bannings in different places,” Walz told Bream. “We’re seeing attempts in schools.” First, a reality check: The Biden-Harris administration has helped fund and actively support the largest censorship system in our history, a system described by one federal court as “Orwellian.”

These are actual and unrelenting efforts to target individuals and groups for opposing views on subjects ranging from gender identity to climate change to COVID to election fraud. While Walz and others rarely specifically reference the book bans in question, Florida is one state whose laws concern age limits on access to graphic or sexual material in schools. School districts have always been given wide latitude in making such decisions on curriculum or library policies. Indeed, while rarely mentioned by the media, the left has demanded the banning or alteration of a number of classic books, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men,” under diversity or equity rationales. I have long opposed actual book bans perpetrated by both the left and the right. However, school districts have always made such access and curriculum decisions. Finally, Walz and others often sell censorship by citing the dangers of child pornography or of threats made against individuals.

Walz on Sunday followed Hillary Clinton’s recent pro-censorship campaign as he employed such misdirection. “The issue on this was the hate speech and the protected hate speech — speech that’s aimed at creating violence, speech that’s aimed at threats to individuals,” he claimed. “That’s what we’re talking about in this.” First, he’d said there is no protected hate speech. Second, the law already provides ample protections against threats toward individuals. What’s most striking is that, after years of unapologetically embracing censorship (often under the Orwellian term “content moderation”), the left does not seem to want to discuss it in this election. Democrats in Congress opposed every major effort to investigate the role of the Biden administration in the social-media censorship system it constructed. Many denied any such connection. Elon Musk ended much of that debate with the release of the Twitter Files showing thousands of emails from the administration targeting individuals and groups with opposing views.

Now the public is being asked to vote for the most anti-free speech ticket in centuries — but neither Harris nor Walz want to talk about it in any detail. The result may be the largest bait-and-switch in history.

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“He called on Europeans to prevent their continent from “sliding into the darkness of neo-Nazism.”

• Zelensky Wants West To Fight Russia – Exiled Ukrainian Opposition Leader (RT)

Parts of Europe could be turned into “a concentration camp” as Kiev tries to provoke a war between the West and Russia, exiled Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk has warned. Writing in an article for the Other Ukraine news outlet on Monday, Medvedchuk suggested that the primary goal of Vladimir Zelensky’s so-called ‘victory plan’ – which he has been touting to Kiev’s foreign backers – is to push the collective West “into a war with Russia under the leadership of Ukraine and Zelensky personally.” Pointing to how some officials in Kiev have already hailed Ukraine as “the most democratic country in Europe,” claiming it would be “at the top of the EU member states” if it joins the bloc, Medvedchuk suggested that citizens in some European countries could soon be compelled into military service, similarly to how this is enforced in Ukraine.

“Why should men be caught on the streets for war with Russia only in Ukraine? Everything is moving towards the fact that such a ‘festival of democracy’ will be held throughout Europe, and the Ukrainian Territorial Recruitment Office (TCC) will teach this to their European subordinates,” Medvedchuk wrote. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has already suggested that the EU should prepare for war with Russia, he added. Medvedchuk suggested that “Zelensky’s advanced methods” could be used to increase taxes on the population in some European countries in order to fund the military. EU officials could also follow Kiev in banning certain nationalities, religions, and cultures, he warned. “Some may think this is nonsense and an inappropriate joke, but we should remember history,” Medvedchuk said.

“Not long ago, people were burned alive in Europe for the ‘wrong’ nationality and ‘wrong’ political views,” he added, recalling that many Nazi death camps during World War II were guarded by ethnic Ukrainians, who had become “part of the punitive system in Europe.” “Today, it is not Russia, but Nazi Ukraine that dreams of being the gendarme of Europe. And this is a very real scenario, since the process of turning Europe into a concentration camp has been launched,” Medvedchuk claimed. He called on Europeans to prevent their continent from “sliding into the darkness of neo-Nazism.” Medvedchuk was leader of the Opposition Platform – For Life party, formerly the second-largest group in the Ukrainian parliament, until his arrest in April 2022. The party was banned three months later, and Medvedchuk was sent to Russia in exchange for several Ukrainian POWs in September. Since then, he has headed the Other Ukraine movement and acts as chairman of its council.

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“..the units that they considered to be the most unassailable and elite, they are also beginning to slowly lean toward surrendering, as they want to stay alive..”

• ‘Elite’ Ukrainian Troops Surrender In Kursk Region – Chechen Commander (RT)

Many members of the ‘elite’ Ukrainian units that invaded Russia’s Kursk Region often surrender because they are no longer able to fight and want to stay alive, Major-General Apty Alaudinov, the commander of the Akhmat Special Forces from Russia’s Chechen Republic, has said. In an interview with Russian journalist Vladimir Solovyov on Tuesday, Alaudinov rejected Kiev’s claims that Russian soldiers executed nine Ukrainian service members in Kursk Region, many of whom were drone operators. The general dismissed the claim as a psyop, arguing that Ukraine “needs to create fake news to discourage its military from surrendering,” as many of its soldiers “openly say they can fight no more.” Despite these efforts, he added, Ukrainian soldiers “often decide to surrender anyway.”

“What’s interesting is that the units that they considered to be the most unassailable and elite, they are also beginning to slowly lean toward surrendering, as they want to stay alive,” he said. According to Alaudinov, Russia is ready to spare even those who serve in the Aidar Battalion or Azov units, which have been accused of having neo-Nazi sympathies, if they lay down their arms. The general uploaded a video earlier in the day featuring a soldier claiming to be a Ukrainian serviceman who once served in the Aidar Battalion. Standing against a backdrop of Russian and Chechen flags, he said he surrendered voluntarily and asked Alaudinov for help in obtaining Russian citizenship and joining the Ahmat Special Forces.

Several Western media outlets have reported that the Ukrainian military is struggling with exhaustion, low morale, and desertion, with many of the reinforcements arriving at the front suffering from inadequate training, a factor which only exacerbates the above-mentioned issues. Ukraine launched a large-scale incursion into Kursk Region in early August, reportedly committing some of its best troops to the offensive. While they initially made some progress, the incursion forces were halted and later pushed back, according to Moscow. Ukraine has lost more than 23,000 troops since the start of the attack, the Russian Defense Ministry has reported.

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“The Democrats don’t want the US fighting in behalf of Greater Israel prior to the November election, and Putin doesn’t want war prior to the BRICS meeting.”

• The Road to War (Paul Craig Roberts)

The Third Reich is universally demonized, but it was nevertheless far more representative of the German people than the present German government. The present day German government represents the immigrant-invaders. Hitler represented the German people. He rescued them from the unfair burden of the Versailles reparations. He cured inflation and put Germans back to work. He gave them transportation–“the peoples car” — Volkswagen. As David Irving has documented in his histories, Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War, Hitler was forced into war by the British and French. The British gave an unenforceable “guarantee” to the Polish military dictatorship that resulted in Poland refusing to return to Germany the German populations torn from Germany by the Versailles Treaty. Blocked from rescuing Germans via diplomacy from Polish persecution, Germany made an agreement with the Soviet Union to divide Poland in half. Hitler struck first and the Soviet Union soon followed, but the British and French only declared war on Germany.

That is how WWII started. It started when the British and French governments declared war on Germany. Hitler had made it perfectly clear that he did not intend or want war with England and France. Once the British and French governments started the war, it only took Hitler a few weeks to destroy their military forces. Hitler offered England amazing peace terms, including the protection of the British Empire by German forces. Churchill hid the peace terms from his cabinet and ordered the fire-bombing of German cities, a war crime. We are experiencing the same thing in Ukraine today. Washington engineered a coup and overthrew the Ukrainian government and installed a puppet. The puppet began oppressing the Russian areas in Eastern and Southern Ukraine that were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders for administrative and political reasons. Ukraine would not stop the persecution and artillery bombardment of the Russian populations and forced Russia to intervene.

Washington and its NATO puppets quickly widened the war, which was headed into WW III until, apparently, Washington backed away from the threat of sending long range missiles into Russia herself. We don’t know for sure, but that seems to be the case. No sooner than we are, hopefully, spared this avenue into war than we find ourselves on another road to war: an Israeli/US attack on Iran. Washington keeps sending more forces allegedly to “protect Israel,” but realistically to support an attack on Iran. Iran is the target, because Iran is in the way of Greater Israel. Not long ago Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, held up a map of Greater Israel–from the Nile to the Euphrates. Just the other day the Zionist Israeli Finance Minister enlarged Greater Israel. It now includes Saudi Arabia.

The purpose of neoconservative Washington’s “wars against terrorism” in the Middle east–Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria until Russia blocked Obama’s attack on Syria–was to end the flow of arms and money to the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon. Israel coveting the water resources, the Litani River, twice invaded Lebanon intending to occupy the area. Twice a third world militia–Hezbollah–drove the vaunted Israeli Army out. Ever since the Israeli’s have been scheming to have Americans do the job for them by attacking Iran. If Iran can be destroyed, Hezbollah will be without arms and money, and Zionist Israel can expand. This is what the Middle East situation is about. Christian gentiles and Muslims have to die so that Israel can expand. The Muslims will die, because they are disunited and have been for many centuries, thus pissing away their power. The gentiles will die because they have been made guilty by the Holocaust narrative.

“Christian” evangelicals, who are not Christian in any sense, think that it is God’s will for Americans to die for Israel. This is the level of intelligence in the Western world. Putin’s lack of force is one reason we are facing the risk of nuclear Armageddon. Putin let the conflict in Ukraine widen to the point that his back was to the wall, and he had to say “missiles sent into Mother Russia means the US and NATO are at war with Russia.” Both the outgoing and incoming NATO Secretary Generals said, “There is no reason to believe Putin. He never does anything.” Obviously, these statements reveal that the West is not convinced that Russia will fight, no matter what insults and provocations are heaped upon Putin and Russia.

In the Middle East, after showing proactive leadership and preventing Obama’s Invasion of Syria, Putin again became reactive, leaving all initiative in the hands of Israel and Washington. Consequently, the lack of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian leadership has resulted in the same war conditions arising in the Middle East. For reasons difficult to understand, Russia, China, and Iran have not announced a mutual defense treaty. Such a treaty would immediately end the conflict in the Middle East. Both Israel and Washington are insane, but they still realize that they have zero chance of surviving a conflict with Russia, China, and Iran. So, where is this treaty than can stop World War III? The Democrats don’t want the US fighting in behalf of Greater Israel prior to the November election, and Putin doesn’t want war prior to the BRICS meeting. Therefore, the can will be kicked down the road. But the issue is far from resolved.

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“The BRICS currency is very far along in establishing itself as a viable payment currency.”

• This Will Destroy the Dollar (Jim Rickards)

The subject of a BRICS currency is confusing to most observers and is a fraught topic even for many experts. We’ll call the potential currency a BRIC for convenience although no formal name has been announced. The starting point is to distinguish between a payment currency and a reserve currency. A payment currency is used to settle purchases and sales of tradable goods and services. A reserve currency is the denomination of the currency in which national savings are invested, typically in U.S. Treasury securities or gold. Some currencies perform both functions as reserve and payment currencies especially U.S. dollars and euros. A finance minister or central banker can move from one to the other; currencies earned can be invested as reserves or reserves can be sold to finance purchases. Still, it’s important to bear the distinction in mind when evaluating the use case for each currency, especially BRICs. Put differently, a flaw or deficiency in one usage does not preclude the other.

The BRICS currency is very far along in establishing itself as a viable payment currency. The prerequisites are: agreed-upon value (which can be fixed to another currency, floating or pegged to a weight of gold), secure payments channels (basically high-speed, encrypted digital pipes for authenticated message traffic), digital ledgers and an agreed issuer (the NDB based in Shanghai may be suitable for this purpose but another institution could be created). The single most important element is a sufficiently large membership in the BRICS currency union such that a recipient of BRICS payments can use them for purchases in many jurisdictions for many goods and services. This last point is where most alternative currency payments arrangements fall down. Russia can sell oil to China for yuan (which they are currently doing) but they are constrained in terms of where they can spend the yuan (basically limited to Chinese manufactured goods and semiconductors).

The same issue arises when Russia sells oil to India (for rupees) or weapons to Iran (for rials). The seller is limited in terms of what they can buy with the trading partner’s currency. This constraint goes away in a currency union with 15 or 20 members or more. If Russia earns BRICs from China, they can buy Embraer aircraft from Brazil or semiconductors from Malaysia. For that matter, use of a payment currency in a multimember currency union is not limited to members. With access to the payment channels, non-members can nevertheless agree to receive the BRICS currency in payment confident in their ability to spend it among the other BRICS members who are trading partners. The proof of this is the eurozone, which is currently a 20-member currency union with a single central bank and worldwide acceptance of the euro. Moving from a payment currency to a reserve currency is more difficult. The prerequisite here is a large, liquid bond market.

That bond market has to be surrounded by extensive transactional and legal infrastructure including: securities at all maturities (30 days to 30 years), an underwriting system (primary dealers in the U.S.), an auction system for sales of new issues, a repo market to finance inventories, futures, options, other derivatives (swaps), settlement channels, custodians (DTCC, others), etc. Above all, holders need a good rule of law regime on which to rely in the case of disputes or defaults. All of these elements exist in the reserve currency bond market nonpareil — the U.S. Treasury securities market. None of it exists in the form of a putative BRICS bond market. It would likely take 10 years or longer to create reserve currency infrastructure with the biggest single impediment being the rule of law. That said, there are several interesting developments taking place. The first is that the U.S. is squandering its rule of law advantage with sanctions on Russia, the freezing of the assets of the Central Bank of Russia and efforts to actually steal those assets and convert them into a $50 billion loan to Ukraine using structured finance.

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“..has had to make significant and highly expensive amendments to our fleet programs as a result of Boeing’s multiple contractual shortfalls..”

• Emirates Flags ‘Serious Talks’ With Boeing (RT)

The president of Emirates, one of the world’s largest international airlines, has said the carrier will have “serious conversations” with Boeing after the US manufacturing giant announced that its 777X model will be further delayed. Boeing confirmed last week that the first delivery of its widebody aircraft will be postponed to 2026, nearly six years after the 777X aircraft was due to reach customers. Commenting on the delay, Emirates president Tim Clark stated on Monday that the airline “has had to make significant and highly expensive amendments to our fleet programs as a result of Boeing’s multiple contractual shortfalls, and we will be having a serious conversation with them over the next couple of months.” The United Arab Emirates flagship carrier is also one of Boeing’s largest widebody customers, with an outstanding order for 150 aircraft.

The first 777Xs were originally scheduled for delivery in 2021, but the company has repeatedly pushed back the launch date. In August, the manufacturer suspended 777X flight tests after discovering cracks in a critical component connecting engines to wings. The delivery delay comes as the company grapples with certification hurdles and labor strikes involving nearly 33,000 of its US workers. The ongoing strikes have undercut the production of Boeing’s best-selling planes such as the 737 MAX, 777 and 767, and halted its 777X test program. Last week, Boeing also announced plans to cut 17,000 jobs over the coming months, representing nearly 10% of its workforce, as the aerospace giant’s losses continue to mount.

Clark expressed frustration over revised timelines for 777X deliveries, which have been shared by other airline executives awaiting supplies amid strong travel demand. “Given the Type Inspection Authorization halt on the 777X with no clear timeline for the restart, coupled with strikes entering a fourth week, I fail to see how Boeing can make any meaningful forecasts of delivery dates,” he stated. Emirates has had to launch a $3 billion retrofit program to include 191 aircraft to accommodate the postponement. The program involves upgrading the carrier’s existing fleet of Boeing 777 and Airbus A380 aircraft, installing next-generation seating and overhauling the interiors to extend their operations. With extended delays, the airline has been forced to extend the lifespans of existing jets, increasing aircraft maintenance costs.

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“A large gap remains between Republicans and Democrats, with only 12% of the former expressing trust in media reporting against 54% of the latter.”

• Trust in US News Media Hits Record Low – Gallup (RT)

Less than a third of Americans trust US news media, a record low figure, according to a new Gallup poll published Monday. This year’s poll showed a 1 percentage point drop of Americans who believe the media reports the news fully and accurately from last year. The trend has been on a downward trajectory since 2018. For the third consecutive year, the number of Americans who claim to completely distrust the media remained higher than those who trust it. The new poll, however, demonstrated a slight drop, with 36% of respondents expressing complete distrust versus 39% in 2023. Meanwhile, those having “not very much” confidence in the media grew to reach 33% this year. A large gap remains between Republicans and Democrats, with only 12% of the former expressing trust in media reporting against 54% of the latter.

However, the partisan gap has actually been narrowing in the last couple of years. According to data aggregated by Gallup, in 2022, for instance, some 70% of Democrats expressed confidence in the media. The pollster sampled 1,007 adult Americans living across the country. The survey was conducted over the first two weeks of September via phone interviews. Respondents were picked randomly for the survey. Gallup first asked Americans the question back in 1972 and has conducted the media trust poll on an almost yearly basis since 1997. While in the 1970s, the trust rate hovered around the 70% mark, it had deteriorated to around 55% by the late 1990s, and has continued to drop over the past two decades.

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Sounds barely serious.

• British Government’s Novichok Trial Reveals A Toxic Shock (Helmer)

In the first day of public hearings directed by retired judge Anthony Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley (lead image) – the evidence compiled over six years by the police, secret services, CCTV records, and witnesses is that Novichok, identified as one of the world’s fastest acting nerve poisons, was sprayed on the front door-handle of Sergei Skripal’s house in order to kill him by direct contact. “As each of them touched the front door-handle on the way out of the house, that they were poisoned with Novichok,” reported the judge’s chief counsel, Andrew O’Connor KC. “It was this door handle that was the source or, in their [police] term, the ground zero of the Novichok contamination”, (O’Connor page 19, line 13, page 24, line 6). In the official narrative, it then took at least two and a half hours to act on the alleged Russian assassination targets, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, as they sat on a bench in the centre of Salisbury town after drinking at a local pub and then eating at a restaurant.

That was between 1:30 pm and 4 pm on March 4, 2018. Between the prosecution’s alleged murder weapon and the attempted murder, 120 to 150 minutes had elapsed. This contrasts with the official narrative of the Novichok poisoning of Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018, that between contact with the poison and her fatal heart attack the elapsed interval was “between about 9.30 and 10 o’clock that morning” — less than 30 minutes. The evidence of the two assassins – Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov — charged with attempted murder of the Skripals includes “plentiful evidence of their movements and actions and we will review it in detail during the coming hearings. The evidence is complex and of course the detail matters. For today’s purposes, I propose simply to outline the effect of the CCTV evidence regarding Petrov and Boshirov’s movements in the course of their two visits to Salisbury.”

In the summary presented to Hughes’ courtroom for the first time of CCTV imagery, there is no evidence at all that the assassins came close to the Skripal house, neither on their first walking tour of the town on March 3, nor on the following fateful day, March 4. “Of course the detail matters” – but there is no fresh evidence of how close or how far the alleged assassins came to the Skripal house. All that is now alleged in the photographic and map displays presented during the hearing is that “both Petrov and Boshirov and the Skripals are in very much the same area at very much the same time. One has to aim off course because two of them are on foot and then there’s the car. But it does seem at least possible that Boshirov and Petrov may even have been in the vicinity of Sergei Skripal’s house at the time that the Skripals were leaving.”

For the inquiry team and its police and government sources, O’Connor admitted the CCTV evidence for the allegation that Boshirov and Petrov sprayed their poison on the Skripal door-handle is missing. “They were then lost from the view of CCTV cameras for 31 minutes before they re-emerged at the junction of the High Street and Bridge Street — that’s the blue marking to the right that you can see there – and walked back towards the station. You will hear evidence, sir, as to where they might have been and what they might have done during that 31-minute period.”

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“Druzhba is also one of the most technically-sophisticated manmade engineering projects in history.”

• Druzhba: Oil Mega-Pipeline That Evaded US Sabotage (Sp.)

Tuesday is the anniversary of the creation of Druzbha – the world’s longest oil pipeline, and one of the most technically sophisticated pieces of man-made engineering every created. Here’s what’s important to know about the project, why it was conceived, and why the US and its allies tried, but failed, to stop it. October 15 marks the 60th anniversary of the inauguration of the Druzhba (‘Friendship’) oil pipeline. Conceived in 1958 at a meeting of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance – the Soviet-led analogue to Western European integration, Druzhba helped forge closer economic links between the USSR and its Eastern European allies, and eventually, between Russia and the whole of Europe. Drawn up to aid an economic boom being experienced by Eastern Europe, Druzhba was built to replace more costly and infrastructure-intensive rail-based oil deliveries.

Sourcing oil from the Volga-Ural oil and gas basin and starting off in Almetyevsk, modern-day Tatarstan, Druzhba runs west to Mozyr in Belarus, where it splits into two routes – one to eastern Germany via Poland, and another through Ukraine toward Bratislava in Slovakia, Prague in the Czech Republic and Budapest in Hungary. Members of the Soviet-led economic alliance, namely Albania, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, contributed equipment and know-how, with the USSR and Poland delivering 730,000 tons of 420-1,220 mm pipes, East Germany pumps for pumping stations, Hungary automation equipment and communications gear, and Czechoslovakia valves and fittings. The US sought to sanction the project into submission, slapping restrictions on Western European sales of large-diameter pipes to the Eastern Bloc after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Russian Chelyabinsk’s industrialists saved the day, creating pipes of the necessary diameter.

The success of the project led to the construction of a second line – known as Druzhba-2 and running along the same route, in 1974. With Moscow selling oil to allies via long-term contracts, Eastern Europe was largely insulated from the oil shocks suffered by the West in the 1970s and early 1980s. Between 1971 and 1980, Hungary’s material national income rose by 62%, East Germany’s by 59%, Poland’s by 73%, Czechoslovakia’s by 57%, and capital construction in these countries grew 1.9, 1.7, 2.2, and 1.8 times, respectively. This allowed the region to build tens of millions of new apartments, industrial goods and finished products ranging from cars and electronics to household goods. After the USSR’s collapse, Germany’s reunification and the European Union’s expansion, Druzhba became a key source of fuel for Europe’s economic prosperity, helping Eastern Europe with its difficult transition to the market, and Germany in its effort to build on its status as an industrial powerhouse.

Accounting for expansions (including extensions to deliver oil to southern Germany and Austria), Druzhba holds the record as the longest oil pipeline network in the world, consisting of a whopping 8,900 km of pipe, 46 pumping stations, 38 intermediate pumping stations, and reservoirs that can hold up to 1.5 million cubic meters of oil. Druzhba is also one of the most technically-sophisticated manmade engineering projects in history, crossing the Volga, Oka, Don, Dnepr, Dniestr, Vistula and Dunabe rivers and hundreds of smaller waterways, thousands of roads and railways, the Pinsk Marshes and the mountains of Carpathia. The pipeline has an estimated capacity to pump up to 2 million barrels per day, or nearly a fifth of Russia’s total oil output. Until recently, it accounted for up to half of all Russian oil exports.

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Service dog https://twitter.com/i/status/1846066185760084188

 

 

Yak https://twitter.com/i/status/1846100084473168016

 

 

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Oct 132024
 
 October 13, 2024  Posted by at 8:31 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  64 Responses »


Max Ernst Ubu Imperator 1923

 

Kamala Unwinding (Kunstler)
US Election ‘Too Close To Call’ In Swing States – WSJ Poll (RT)
The Scent of a Harris Panic in the Air (Victor Davis Hanson)
Shills For Harris (Michael Tracey)
Dems Won’t Certify Election if Trump Wins (HUSA)
Trump’s Toughest Foe Could Be Harris Lawyer Marc Elias (Sperry)
Alien Enemies Act is Not a Viable Legal Basis for “Operation Aurora” (Turley)
Jon Stewart: Americans Don’t Need Guns To Protect Constitutional Rights (ZH)
Biden, Netanyahu Closer to Consensus on Attacking Iran (Antiwar)
Biden Warns Iran Against Going After Trump – WaPo (RT)
CBS News Faces Integrity Crisis Amid Bias Concerns, Missteps (JTN)
3 Million Non-Citizens Have Texas Driver’s Licenses Allowed As Voter ID (JTN)
DOJ Sues Virginia Over Removing Non-Citizens From Voter Rolls (JTN)
NATO Could Have Prevented Ukraine Conflict – Hungary FM (RT)
NATO Planning New Russia Strategy – Politico (RT)
Boeing To Fire 17,000 Employees (RT)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1844891735018573869

Trump ad

Vance

Jan 6

Kirk

Tucker Dhillon https://twitter.com/i/status/1844809672911679769

Hawley Wray

Judge Thomas

Appellate

 

 

 

 

 

 

“She ends as an historical prank on her own country. It must be deeply demoralizing to be used like that in front of the whole world.”

• Kamala Unwinding (Kunstler)

The outstanding question: will the Democratic Party actually go ahead and attempt to execute an election steal despite growing evidence of a developing Trump landslide that might obviate it? The works are already in motion. The mail-in ballots went out long ago and early votes are getting cast by the day. The overseas ballots that require no US address or voter verification are flooding in by the millions and four years of open borders has 10-million illegal aliens (at a minimum) dispersed around the nation, great gobs of them planted in swing states, processed through the DMVs and social services — with the requisite automatic voter registration — their ballots already pre-bundled for harvest.

It could go a few ways. One is, just let’er rip, harvest all those fake votes, stuff the drop-boxes, flood the zone, and do it all right in America’s face as if to say: we can do whatever we want. . . to get whatever we want. . . and you can’t stop us. That is probably the point where blue America finds out exactly what the Second Amendment was designed for. You might also expect a whole lot of state-organized resistance, especially in the populous red ones, Texas, Florida, real court cases over fraud this time, contested certification.

Or, the election could come out a hopeless unresolvable muddle. There’s no precedent for this and no provision in the Constitution, but you can imagine the Supreme Court having to decide a necessary do-over minus all recent gimmicks, paper ballots only, voters with proof of citizenship only, all voting on one re-scheduled election day before January 1. This novelty would be something apart from the clunky Congressional machinery established for settling electoral college disputes, since it is predicated on various states’ inability to determine their electoral college vote in the first place, based on patent irregularity and fraud. You could also imagine a period of disorder so deep and grave that the regime behind “Joe Biden” declares martial law. . . or, alternately the military — the martial institution — has to take matters into its own hands, shoving aside even “Joe Biden” and his filthy retinue. Appalling to consider, I’m sure, but these things happen in history, and the Party of Chaos has set enough mischief in motion to wreck the election and wreck the country. Call it catastrophizing, if you will. There it is.

But to step back from that abyss, it appears that Mr. Trump’s momentum accelerates by the day, that he is becoming, at last, an implacable, irresistible juggernaut who will, perforce, overcome all the gimmicks, traps, and frauds arrayed against him. Kamala seems to think so. Have you ever seen such resignation, such loserdom-in-action as her recent performance on CBS’s 60-Minutes, or her pitiful admission on ABC’s The View that she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently beyond the excellent management of national affairs under “Joe Biden” (and herself as veep). Surely that said it all. She has nothing, brings nothing. Long ago, she was a pretty girl with a law degree and an infectious laugh on the fringes of local politics in San Francisco. The winds of fortune blew her this way and that way until she ended up way over her head, used by the reprobates around her as a mere device to stay out of jail. She ends as an historical prank on her own country. It must be deeply demoralizing to be used like that in front of the whole world.

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With all the shenanigans going on, Trump needs to win by a huge margin. Another reason not to believe these polls.

• US Election ‘Too Close To Call’ In Swing States – WSJ Poll (RT)

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are locked into a dead heat in all seven of the battleground states that will decide the outcome of next month’s US presidential election, according to a poll published on Friday by the Wall Street Journal. Sampling 4,200 voters, the poll found Harris with a razor-thin lead over Trump in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and Trump holding a slim advantage in Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. However, the newspaper noted that no lead is wider than two percentage points, except for in Nevada, where Trump leads by five points. All of these results are within the newspaper’s margin of error. Across all seven swing states, Trump leads Harris by 46% to 45%, the poll found. Some 93% of Republicans are backing Trump, while 93% of Democrats are supporting Harris, the WSJ noted, adding that independents prefer Harris by a slim 40% to 39%.

“This thing is a dead heat and is going to come down to the wire. These last three weeks matter,” Republican pollster David Lee, who worked on the survey, told the newspaper. “It really could not be closer,” Democrat pollster Michael Bocian said. “It’s an even-steven, tight, tight race.” A slew of recent polls have shown Trump and Harris within the low single digits of each other in these key states, with Trump gaining the upper hand in every state but Wisconsin in an average compiled by RealClearPolitics. Voters surveyed by the Wall Street Journal ranked the economy and immigration as their top two issues of concern, respectively.

They favored Trump over Harris on economic issues by ten points, and on immigration and border security by 16 points. Harris beat Trump on the issue of abortion by 16 points. By this time in the 2020 campaign, President Joe Biden was leading Trump by five points in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump won all three of these post-industrial northern battlegrounds in 2016, and lost them to Biden in 2020. Winning all three would likely guarantee the presidency to either Trump or Harris this year.

Baris

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“..so far, the cures for the Harris slide are far worse than the malady itself..”

• The Scent of a Harris Panic in the Air (Victor Davis Hanson)

The 2024 race is still close. But then so was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race at this same juncture. Indeed, incumbent president Carter was then comfortably up in the last two October Gallup polls—before utterly and suddenly evaporating on Election Day. But in the last seven days, there seems a sense of panic in the Harris campaign. How do we know that? Why are Democratic pundits—from Axelrod to Carville—blasting the Harris campaign and otherwise warning of bad things to come? Why are some of the once Democrat sure-thing senate races—e.g., in Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Michigan—tightening up? Pundit poll-watchers are suggesting that Trump is close, even, or slightly ahead in the swing-state polls, suggesting that he is nearing a margin that could cancel out anticipated “ballot irregularities”.

The expected October Harris-Biden surprises—the opportune Fed interest rate cut, the transparently desperate Jack Smith beefed-up re-indictment, the current new Hollywood Trump-hit movie, the desperate Zelensky fly-in to Pennsylvania, the election-cycle customary Bob Woodward unsourced gossip book—seemed so far to have had no effect. Why would any campaign send out the bumbling Tim Walz to a Fox Sunday interview after his disastrous debate? Why is a suddenly smiling Biden so eager to claim candidate and VP Harris as a co-conspirator to his disastrous four years? Why would Harris pivot and now agree to (admittedly mostly softball) interviews, thus confirming to the voting public why she wisely had previously avoided all press conferences, interviews, and town halls? Why—after the last two moderator-rigged ABC and CBS debates—would Harris desperately want another and possibly believe that Trump would ever agree to any such warped forum?

The last 4-5 Harris scripted interviews, but especially on CBS’s 60 Minutes, have been train wrecks. Everyone expected (and was not disappointed) the on-spec word salads, predictable sappy retreats to her misleading bio, the now accustomed deer-in-the-headlights confusion about her prior three years with Biden, and the general mush in lieu of any policy prescriptions. Why would CBS think it worth ruining its already debased reputation by doctoring the transcript of the Harris disastrous interview in a vain attempt at Orwellian repair? Why is a rusty but still narcissistic Barack Obama at last hitting the campaign trail? And is he still effective—or reduced to becoming an Oprah-like caricature? After all, is it wise for the elite Obama (in his now accustomed snarky “clingers” style) to venture out of his mansions (Kalorama? the Hawaii beachfront? or the Martha Vineyard estate?) to talk down to black males struggling under years of a hyperinflationary economy, a flood of illegal immigrants from an open border, and a four-year-spiking crime rate?

Does the Netflix grandee berating black men as victims of false consciousness, misled, and brainwashed into voting for the Trump agenda really win them over to Harris? Does the hundred-million-dollar-plus man Obama persuade anyone by reverting for a few moments to his old community-organizing, fake black patois and his pseudo-racial intimacy of “brothers”? And does it work for Obama (remember “when they go low, we go high”) to blast Trump as racist and crude, when Obama jokes that Trump wears diapers— this after previously suggesting at the Democratic convention that Trump suffered from small genitalia? If this should continue, soon the July 21st coup that removed Biden, along with the Harris pick of Tim Walz, will go down as days of Democrat infamy. Anything can happen in the next three weeks. But so far, the cures for the Harris slide are far worse than the malady itself.

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“These aforementioned attendees were essentially just “seat fillers” — they were not the audience members who were called on to ask pre-selected questions..”

• Shills For Harris (Michael Tracey)

Last night’s Univision “town hall” with Kamala Harris was billed as an exciting opportunity for “undecided Latino voters” to question and evaluate the potential next President of the United States. The corporate press release from Univision advertises it explicitly as such. But viewers at home would have been wholly unaware that this billing was false. As I discovered, having been granted the sacred opportunity to view the event from an adjacent room on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus, the carefully curated “town hall” audience was actually comprised of avowed Harris supporters. “I already knew I was going to go for Kamala,” one town hall participant told me. “Part of the reason why I wanted to go was just, like, to also fully support her.” “So you were already decided, before you came?” I asked another. “Yes,” she replied, declaring her support for Kamala.

The audience members I spoke to were selected with the help of a company called FansOnQ, according to the company’s founder, Conny Quintanilla, whose title for yesterday’s event was “Audience Manager.” The company puts out “casting calls” for events like the Latin Grammy Awards, which have been previously held in Las Vegas. It’s a type of company that you might not be consciously aware exists, but once you’re told of its existence, it makes perfect intuitive sense: people who want to dance at award shows are “vetted” by this particular company, perhaps for good looks and rhythmic skills. That’s the same company which filled the seats at Kamala’s town hall. Another person told me he was able to attend because he “knows people” at an unnamed “progressive organization,” which somehow granted him the ability to get in the town hall audience. The person said he works as an intern for Rep. Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. I’m not naming the person because he was wary of attribution. Others quoted here also didn’t want to be identified.

These aforementioned attendees were essentially just “seat fillers” — they were not the audience members who were called on to ask pre-selected questions. Those audience members were flown in from around the country at Univision’s expense. Which is a bit odd, because there would certainly have been plenty of genuine “undecided Latino voters” in Clark County, Nevada who I’m sure would’ve been more than happy to ask Kamala Harris a question. NOTE: The non-question-asking attendees were still integral to the televisual production of the event, hence their recruitment. Uninformed viewers at home were under the false impression that the people they were watching react to Kamala’s answers were “undecided voters,” when numerous of them were in fact pre-committed Harris voters who sought to attend for the specific purpose of demonstrating their support for Kamala.

Naturally, I wanted to interview the actual question-asking attendees. However, a corporate dictate apparently came down prohibiting this. “We won’t be making them available,” Anna Negron, Director of Corporate Communications at TelevisaUnivision, told me when I asked if there would be an opportunity to interview said audience members. She would not elaborate on the reason for this strange secrecy. Reporter Mark Kellner of the New York Post asked Negron the same question, and was similarly dismissed. So the sum total of the authorized journalistic acts that we were permitted to carry out at this event was to sit in a side room and politely view a generously provided video feed of the “town hall,” which was taped several hours before it aired yesterday. For the record, I don’t think she actually used a teleprompter, despite social media allegations to that effect. I can verify that the event was already contrived enough as it is — no need to embellish any phony stories.

Of course, most journalists covering the event simply repeated the conceit that Kamala was empathetically taking questions from “undecided Latino voters.” In other words, they simply regurgitated the corporate press release. Her actual remarks were bereft of any real substance. The only amusing part was when she name-dropped Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney General under George W. Bush, as one of her cherished Republican endorsements — adding him to the esteemed roster of Dick and Liz Cheney and myriad “national security officials” affiliated with Mitt Romney and John McCain. Perhaps Kamala calculated that the surname “Gonzales” would be extraordinarily appealing to these allegedly “undecided Latino voters.”

It’s worth briefly reminiscing about what the purpose of a “town hall” has traditionally been: for ‘townspeople’ to gather and air their concerns about issues that most affect them. (“Town halls” are actually how some small New England towns are governed — the town halls effectively become temporary citizen-led legislatures to decide questions around zoning and so forth.) Now, though, they’re just glitzy TV productions that accomplish the polar opposite of the free-flowing dialogue and debate with which the term was once associated. Indeed, these events now more resemble the production values of the Latin Grammy Awards — literally — than a forum to scrutinize candidates for public office.

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‘I’ve been told this type of rhetoric is “dangerous to our democracy” or something…’

• Dems Won’t Certify Election if Trump Wins (HUSA)

Despite their constant whining about the Jan. 6, 2021, “insurrection,” the Democrats recently admitted that they won’t certify the 2024 election results if Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is elected. Axios reported that the Democrats would certify the election results only if Trump used “free, fair and honest means to secure a victory,” which, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., is not what Trump would do. This statement implies that he would be declared a winner only if he cheats. “[Trump] is doing whatever he can to try to interfere with the process, whether we’re talking about manipulating electoral college counts in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing other kinds of impediments,” the politician told the news source. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., also questioned whether Trump would win the election fair and square, telling Axios that she doesn’t know “what kind of shenanigans he is planning.”

Conservatives on Twitter pointed out the hypocrisy after the article was published. “I’ve been told this type of rhetoric is “dangerous to our democracy” or something,” @Patriot_Vibes wrote. Co-owner of Trending Politics, Colin Rugg, also mocked the Democrats who have been talking non-stop about Republicans and Trump’s alleged attempt to overthrow the government at the beginning of 2021. “The ‘democracy defenders’ won’t commit to certifying an election?” he wrote. Others wrote that the recent news is a warning from Democrats about their own insurrection, this time it being real and violent. Some conservatives noted that hearing about the recent news was not surprising after the Democrats replaced Joe Biden, who was elected by leftists during the primaries, with the current Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, who nobody cared about before the disastrous debate between Trump and Biden.

“No surprise there. They threw democracy out the window when they put Kamala in w/o a single vote. Why wouldn’t they pull some more shenanigans? We’ll get SCOTUS involved if we have to, but they need to do their job or GTFO,” an anonymous person wrote. The Democrats’ recent comments are also unsurprising because Raskin said he would never allow Trump to be in the White House again. “I’ve been warning of this for months. Here is Rep Jamie Raskin confirming what I’ve been predicting. Even if President Trump wins the 2024 election, Democrats will not accept the results and refuse to leave the White House, creating a civil war scenario,” investigative reporter and commentator Drew Hernandez said.

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Elias makes a lot of money. But I think the Steele dossier has tainted him too much to be effective.

“According to court records, Elias acted as a cutout for more than $1 million in campaign payments for the dossier..”

• Trump’s Toughest Foe Could Be Harris Lawyer Marc Elias (Sperry)

Elias later testified that he was worried – then as now – that Trump was a threat to democracy: “I received information that was troubling as someone who cares about democracy.” That “information” turned out to be a fictitious “dossier” linking Trump to the Kremlin crafted by former British spook and FBI informant Christopher Steele, who huddled with Elias in his Washington office. “Some of the information that was in it I think has actually proved true. It was accurate and important,” Elias testified in a closed-door hearing on Capitol Hill in December 2017, according to a declassified transcript. Actually, Steele’s allegations proved to be a collection of improbable rumors and fabricated allegations invented by Steele’s top researcher and a Clinton campaign adviser. Nonetheless, the disinformation was fed to the FBI and media, igniting criminal investigations (including illegal electronic surveillance), congressional probes, and a media frenzy that crippled Trump’s presidency with bad press for years.

In a parallel operation against Trump, Elias worked with his then-law partner Michael Sussmann and Clinton campaign officials – including Jake Sullivan, who is now President Biden’s national security adviser – to develop misleading evidence of a “secret hotline” between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that allegedly used a “back channel” connection between email servers at Trump Tower and Russian-owned Alfa Bank. These false allegations were posted on social media and brought to the attention of the FBI, triggering a separate criminal investigation targeting Trump and his campaign. Like other Russiagate probes, it was eventually discredited. But the damage was done. By spreading fake Russian dirt on Trump, Elias was able to create scandals that dogged Trump for years, tarnishing his electability. The Democratic lawyer’s machinations, however, drew scrutiny from other investigators and hurt his own reputation – albeit temporarily.

During his probe of Russiagate, Special Counsel John Durham found Elias intentionally sought to conceal Clinton’s role in the dossier. According to court records, Elias acted as a cutout for more than $1 million in campaign payments for the dossier. By laundering its payments through a law firm, the Clinton campaign and Elias were able to claim attorney-client confidentiality when Durham sought their internal emails (the assertion of that privilege also blocked investigators from accessing communications between Elias and Steele’s immediate employer, the Washington-based opposition research firm, FusionGPS). But their shell game got the Clinton campaign in trouble with the Federal Election Commission, which later fined it and the Democratic National Committee $113,000 for misreporting the purpose of the payments as “legal expenses,” rather than opposition research, in violation of FEC laws.

The Durham probe, which Elias insists was “politically motivated,” nonetheless raised ethical issues with the D.C. Bar and Elias’ former law firm, Perkins Coie, reportedly leading to their breakup in August 2021, when Elias suddenly left the powerhouse after almost 30 years. The firm, which Elias had joined fresh out of law school in 1993, grew “increasingly uncomfortable” with the unwanted scrutiny the Durham probe invited on it, according to published reports. The veteran prosecutor exposed questionable billing practices by the firm. Durham also revealed the Democratic firm had set up an FBI workspace within its Washington offices, further calling into question the FBI’s impartiality in investigating Trump. In late 2021, Elias opened his own firm, the Elias Law Group, but soon lost major clients who reportedly grew weary of his aggressive tactics and go-it-alone style.

Last year, the DNC severed its 15-year relationship with Elias; then more recently, the Biden campaign parted company with him. In 2020, Elias had quarterbacked Biden’s legal team that fought Trump’s claims in court that the election had been stolen. He also beat back GOP measures to ensure election integrity after Democrats took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to dramatically loosen rules for voting – including allowing ballot harvesting, drop boxes, and ballots arriving up to four days after Election Day to still be counted. Top Democratic Party officials were said to sour on Elias after he filed election-related lawsuits without consulting with them, some of which backfired with unfavorable – and lasting – rulings. Biden’s team reportedly also became frustrated with his fees. Elias billed the DNC and Biden campaign more than $20 million during the 2020 election cycle.

But Elias has since taken on other clients – including Kamala Harris – who have more than made up for the loss in revenue. So far in this election cycle, the latest FEC filings show the Elias Law Group has received a total of more than $22 million in disbursements from a host of major Democratic and anti-Trump clients.

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It’s a war act. But there’s no war.

• Alien Enemies Act is Not a Viable Legal Basis for “Operation Aurora” (Turley)

In announcing his “Operation Aurora,” former President Donald Trump has suggested that he may use the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798 to crackdown on “every illegal migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” The plan to begin mass deportations is certainly popular with the public, according to polling. However, without a declaration of war, he will likely have to look to alternative statutory vehicles for a peacetime operation. This is not the first time that the Trump campaign has invoked the AEA. Last year, the campaign cited the law as giving it the power to “remove all known or suspected gang Members, drug dealers, or Cartel Members from the U.S.” The AEA has only been used three times and each time we were in a declared war: the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. It is a law that became infamous in its use to put Japanese, German, and Italian civilians in internment camps during World War II. In DeLacey v. United States in 1918, the Ninth Circuit wrote that:

“The first reported case arising under the [AEA] is [by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in] Lockington’s Case [in 1814] … Lockington … had refused to comply with the executive order of February 23, 1813, requiring alien enemies who were within 40 miles of tidewater to retire to such places beyond that distance from tidewater as should be designated by the marshals. He was arrested, and on petition for habeas corpus attempted to test the legality of his imprisonment. Chief Justice Tilghman said of the [AEA]: “It is a provision for the public safety, which may require that the alien should not be removed, but kept in the country under proper restraints. … It is never to be forgotten that the main object of the law is to provide for the safety of the country from enemies who are suffered to remain within it. In order to effect this safety, it might be necessary to act on sudden emergencies. … The President, being best acquainted with the danger to be apprehended, is best able to judge of the emergency which might render such measures necessary. Accordingly, we find that the powers vested in him are expressed in the most comprehensive terms.”

The laws sweeping language makes it ripe for abuse. Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Brackenridge in Lockington’s Case (1814) observed that under the AEA “the President would seem to be constituted, as to this description of persons, with the power of a Roman dictator or consul, in extraordinary cases, when the Republic was in danger, that it sustain no damage: ne quid detrimenti respublica capiat.” However, the AEA’s only limiting language is found in the triggering language for those powers: “Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event…” In Ludecke v. Watkins, 335 U.S. 160 (1948), the Supreme Court held Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote a supportive decision of the presidential authority under the AEA on when the powers expired, but not when the powers begin:

“And so we reach the claim that, while the President had summary power under the Act, it did not survive cessation of actual hostilities. This claim in effect nullifies the power to deport alien enemies, for such deportations are hardly practicable during the pendency of what is colloquially known as the shooting war. Nor does law lag behind common sense. War does not cease with a cease-fire order, and power to be exercised by the President such as that conferred by the Act of 1798 is a process which begins when war is declared but is not exhausted when the shooting stops.” This broad granting of authority under the AEA is obviously a great attraction for presidents who have rarely hesitated to use the maximal levels of their powers. However, the threshold requirement of a declared war has proven the limiting element and it is telling that the law been used only three times by presidents.

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“Once a government has a monopoly on violence, the concept of public consent is meaningless..”

• Jon Stewart: Americans Don’t Need Guns To Protect Constitutional Rights (ZH)

Donald Trump’s recent return to Butler, PA where he was nearly assassinated due to Secret Service incompetence (or deliberate failure) has got the political left all worked up. Perhaps in part because Thomas Crooks failed to complete his task despite being given every conceivable opportunity to succeed, but also because Elon Musk was there to support the rally. Nothing Musk said was particularly shocking to normal Americans, but his comments on the necessity of the 2nd Amendment as a means to keep the 1st Amendment have outraged Democrats. Coastal progressives in particular have sought to disarm the rest of the nation for decades. Gun control and ultimately gun confiscation are foundational policies that their movement revolves around. The question is, why? Why are they so desperate to violate the Bill of Rights and take firearms away?

They certainly don’t care about people’s safety. If they did, they wouldn’t have cheered on the baseless and violent BLM and Antifa riots. Social media is replete with woke activists calling for the deaths of conservatives. These are not peaceful people seeking nirvana, they are happy to use violence if they think it will get them more power. This is a problem that old-school Democrats like Jon Stewart continue to enable while pretending it doesn’t exist. Stewart, clinging to cultural relevancy on his newly rebooted Daily Show, attempted to lampoon Elon Musk over his assertions on the 2A in Butler, but his strange diatribe about representative democracy is a retro callback to the 1990s and comes off as rather naive. Does Stewart really believe this nonsense? It’s hard to say, but the past few years have made his arguments obsolete.

The 1st Amendment is not protected by the “consent of the governed.” Americans just experienced a three year period of active censorship under the Biden Administration working closely with Big Tech and social media companies. Stewart shrugs off such censorship as if it’s overblown and doesn’t matter, but even Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook was under pressure from the establishment to silence dissent on a number of issues from covid mandates to Hunter Biden’s laptop. Contrary to Stewart’s delusions about democracy, the reality is that the Constitution does not defend itself. According to polls a large number of Democrats desired the erasure of numerous rights during the covid scare. They don’t represent the majority, but there is more than enough of them to add weight to any authoritarian effort. And, the only thing stopping them from getting everything they want is the existence of millions of American gun owners.

It’s not as if the progressive/globalist establishment intends to give up, either. As John Kerry noted during a climate conference held by the WEF in September, their open intent is to shut down free speech rights regardless of the democratic process. If they could get rid of the 1st Amendment, they would. The only reason they haven’t is because the US government doesn’t have a monopoly on force. In Stewart’s fantasy land, a free Republic is a self perpetuating entity that continues on for eternity once it is set in motion, driven only by the goodness and purity of ideology and the voting process. But elections can be subverted by top-down corruption and the system has clearly been broken for some time. One only need to look at the malicious government crackdown on speech happening in the UK to see what happens when a population is disarmed.

There are examples of this across the globe, yet in the world of The Daily Show there is some kind of magical force embedded in “democracy” that protects the populace from abuse. To be sure, the act of violent rebellion is generally a last resort after all other measures have been exhausted. It’s just important to recognize that there’s always a breaking point and America is very close now. Stewart ironically contradicts his own premise when he claims guns “only protect the speech of the people holding the guns.” Yes Jon, that’s why the 2A exists, so that everyone’s speech is protected. Because a representative government can become a tyrannical government as easily as any other government. All it takes is time. The 2A ensures that the “consent of the governed” is never manufactured or forced without the threat of rebellion. Once a government has a monopoly on violence, the concept of public consent is meaningless and the elites will do as they please.

As Thomas Jefferson once wisely stated in reference to the potential for future citizen rebellion: “…What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

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WWIII as their legacy for Trump.

• Biden, Netanyahu Closer to Consensus on Attacking Iran (Antiwar)

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved closer to an understanding on Israel’s plans to attack Iran during their phone call on Wednesday, Axios reported on Thursday. The report, which cited US and Israeli officials, said that the US had accepted Israel is going to launch a major attack on Iran soon and is only concerned that striking certain types of targets could dramatically escalate things. However, Iran has vowed it will respond to any type of Israeli attack, and the situation could easily turn into a full-blown war that would involve the US. An Israeli official told Axios that the Israeli plans are still a bit more aggressive than the US would like. The US has been warning against striking nuclear facilities or oil infrastructure, and recent media reports have said Israel will likely target military infrastructure.

Netanyahu convened his security cabinet on Thursday to brief them on the situation with the US and is expected to get approval for him and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to set a timeline for the Israeli attack. The Times of Israel reported that the US and Israel will continue conversations on the plans in the coming days, signaling the attack is not imminent. NBC News reported on Tuesday that the US was considering supporting Israel’s attack with direct airstrikes of its own, although US officials said intelligence support was more likely. The Jerusalem Post reported that the US was offering Israel a “compensation package” of military aid and full diplomatic support if it only hits US-approved targets in Iran. The US has also committed to defending Israel from any Iranian response.

Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel last week in response to a string of Israeli escalations, including the assassination of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Immediately after the attack, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the US would work with Israel to ensure Iran suffers “severe consequences.”

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So noble.

• Biden Warns Iran Against Going After Trump – WaPo (RT)

US president Joe Biden has told the White House National Security Council to warn Iran against trying to assassinate Donald Trump, the Washington Post has reported. The message that the US president wanted to be relayed to Tehran was that Washington would treat any attempt on the life of his predecessor, or on that of any other former American official, as an act of war, the paper wrote on Friday. WaPo cited National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett, who insisted that Biden has directed “every resource” to make sure that the Republican Party nominee is well protected and that his security detail receives intelligence data in a timely manner about any dangers he might face. “We consider this a national and homeland security matter of the highest priority, and we strongly condemn Iran for these brazen threats,” Savett stated.

Tehran will face “severe consequences” if it attacks any American citizen, including people who “continue to serve the US or those who formerly served,” he stressed. Late last month, Trump claimed that there were “big threats” on his life, coming from Iran. He said that the two assassination attempts against him in recent months, at a rally in Pennsylvania in July then, in September, at his golf club in Florida, “may or may not involve” Tehran. WaPo, citing sources familiar with the matter, wrote that currently there is no evidence tying Tehran to either of the incidents. The former president’s statement came a day after his team announced that they had a meeting with representatives of US intelligence, who warned them about Tehran’s alleged plans to kill Trump and to “sow chaos” in the country.

Politico said on Friday that it had talked to dozens of officials, who claimed that Iran’s efforts to kill Trump, as well as persons involved in the assassination of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, were “even more extensive and aggressive than previously reported.” Soleimani died in a US drone strike outside an airport in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in January 2020, during Trump’s period in office, and Iran has promised that he would be avenged. However, after Trump was wounded in the ear in an assassination attempt on July 13, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani stressed that Tehran “strongly rejects” any suggestion that it was involved. “Iran is determined to pursue legal action against Trump for his direct role in the crime of assassinating Martyr General Qassem Soleimani,” Kanaani said.

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“About the notion that broadcast licenses should be up for bidding anew, Collins said: “If it causes a conversation in the halls of New York, and panic, maybe I’m all for it.”

• CBS News Faces Integrity Crisis Amid Bias Concerns, Missteps (JTN)

CBS News was once home to giants in the journalism industry. Walter Cronkite – known as “the most trusted man in America” – broadcast from a bomber in WWII on a mission over Germany. Edward R. Murrow changed investigative reporting forever with a 1960 documentary that is still taught in journalism schools today. And Mike Wallace could stir fear in the hearts of interview subjects with a simple phone call from his “60 Minutes” office. But today the news giant once heralded as the “Tiffany network” is blinking with crisis as the neutrality of its anchors is challenged and the integrity of editing at its most famous news magazine has been questioned. Many believe the storm of credibility was born two decades ago when then-Anchor Dan Rather’s supposed scoop on George W. Bush’s Vietnam war service factually crumbled, a miscue so embarrassing it sunk the 60 Minutes II franchise for good.

But a steady run of miscues and clashes in the era of Donald Trump and Middle East war has only inflamed the distrust – at least among conservatives – to scandalous levels and left a cloud lingering over the entire CBS News franchise. The most recent accusations of liberal bias exploded when CBS announced ahead of the vice presidential debate between Republican Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee, that its moderators would not “fact-check” the candidates’ answers. Instead, CBS moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan pulled a fast one, and several times argued with him about assertions. At one point when Vance answered their questions pushing back, they interrupted him and cut his mic off. In another event, The Free Press reported that a memo from Mark Memmott, the network’s director of standards and practices, told CBS reporters not to refer to Jerusalem as being in Israel, though it is the nation’s capital city and home to the U.S. embassy.

But perhaps the most politically incendiary incident, and the one that has Trump calling for CBS to lose its broadcast license, involved “60 Minutes” on Monday, when the network’s flagship news show was caught subbing one rambling answer from Vice President Kamala Harris for a more coherent one. “60 Minutes is a major part of the News Organization of CBS, which has just created the Greatest Fraud in Broadcast History,” Trump posted on social media after the Monday night show aired. “CBS should lose its license, and it should be bid out to the Highest Bidder, as should all other Broadcast Licenses, because they are just as corrupt as CBS — and maybe even WORSE!” The Harris interview was conducted by Bill Whitaker at the Naval Observatory over the weekend and an edited portion aired on “Face the Nation,” also a CBS show.

When Whittaker asked about U.S. diplomacy in Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to the Biden administration’s desire to scale down the war against Hamas, Harris responded with: “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.” But when the question aired later on “60 Minutes,” the response by Harris was different. “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” the presidential nominee said. In an additional social-media post by Trump, he said: “With me, 60 Minutes does the exact opposite! They take everything I say, realize how totally BRILLIANT it is, and take it out. So, with Kamala they add, with ‘TRUMP’ they delete. Like the Democrat Party, THEY ARE A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!”

While progressive pundits quickly came to the defense of CBS, saying that edits for the sake of time and “concision” are common in news media, Trump’s assertion that broadcast licenses ought to be in play due to media bias is gaining traction among conservatives. “I want to hold these people responsible. We’re giving them FCC licenses. They don’t deserve them,” Arizona senatorial candidate Kari Lake said Thursday on the “Just the News, No Noise,” TV show with host John Solomon. Broadcast licenses are considered a shared “public common” after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, an obscenity case, that the federal government had jurisdiction to manage the airwaves.

Similarly, former Congressman Doug Collins, who has served as legal counsel for Trump, told co-host Amanda Head that some of Trump’s lawyers will be filing an FEC complaint claiming that CBS has been making in-kind political contributions to the Harris-Walz campaign. About the notion that broadcast licenses should be up for bidding anew, Collins said: “If it causes a conversation in the halls of New York, and panic, maybe I’m all for it.” Michael Whatley, the chair of the Republican National Committee, called the behavior of CBS “appalling” during the “John Solomon Reports” podcast Thursday. “CBS and 60 Minutes are lying to the American people about what was said and what was done in that interview,” Whatley said. “This is just the latest example that the media is absolutely not going to play it straight.” Noting the rise of alternative media and falling ratings for broadcast news shows, he added: “There is a reckoning that is taking place with the mainstream, traditional media outlets that’s long overdue.”

Falling ratings are a long-term problem and has caused layoffs – and O’Donnell took a pay cut in 2022 to $3.8 million annually, down from $8 million previously – but as recently as four years ago the vice presidential debate between Harris and then-Vice President Mike Pence, scored 25 percent more viewers than did last month’s Vance-Walz debate. Another problem faced by CBS is its decision in February to lay off senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge after she reported stories that irritated progressive activists, including some involving the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has launched an investigation into Herridge’s termination.

Herridge went on to say that when she interviewed then-President Trump in 2020, CBS News posted the entire interview transcript. And on Wednesday, Herridge weighed in on the “60 Minutes” fiasco, posting on the X social-media platform: “As Trump campaign calls on @60Minutes to release ‘full, unedited transcript’ of Kamala Harris interview … there is precedent.” The New York Post quoted unnamed sources as saying that “Herridge had pushed for the publication of her full transcript at the time and that it was a “special case.” “It’s about transparency and standing behind the integrity of the final edit,” Herridge posted Wednesday.

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How on earth can you hold a free and fair election under such rules?

• 3 Million Non-Citizens Have Texas Driver’s Licenses Allowed As Voter ID (JTN)

Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy and state Rep. Brian Harrison, R, said that the Texas Department of Public Safety has confirmed there are nearly 3 million non-citizens with driver’s licenses in the state that secretary of state has allowed for use as voter ID. The announcement on Thursday came after an Tuesday advisory by the Texas secretary of state’s elections director, Christina Worrell Adkins, which states that while non-citizen driver’s licenses are not acceptable as voter ID, they can be used if the person is already a registered voter. “BREAKING: according to [Texas Department of Public Safety] – 2,824,613 non-citizens have DL’s, CDL’s, or ID – after working with my friend [Brian Harrison] to run this to ground. That’s why this matters – a lot,” Roy posted on X on Thursday as he shared his earlier post with a Texas Scorecard article about non-citizens using driver’s licenses as voter ID.

“Almost 3 million non-citizens have been issued driver licenses, CDLs, or IDs in Texas,” Harrison wrote Thursday as he shared Roy’s post on X. “The Secretary of State’s office is instructing poll workers to give ballots to people with non-citizen driver licenses. [Chip Roy] is right: ‘this matters a lot.’ Developing..” The secretary of state’s advisory explains that only U.S. citizens are permitted to register to vote and cast ballots in Texas. However, the guidance also states that a person with a non-citizen driver’s license or identification card can vote if they are listed on the voter rolls. If the person is not on the voter rolls and has a non-citizen driver’s license or ID, then they may still vote by provisional ballot.

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Fill up the voter rolls with illegals well in advance and no-one can take them off less than 90 days before the election.

• DOJ Sues Virginia Over Removing Non-Citizens From Voter Rolls (JTN)

The Department of Justice has sued Virginia over removing non-citizens from its voter rolls ahead of the November election. The DOJ announced the suit Friday against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Virginia State Board of Elections, and the Virginia Commissioner of Elections for allegedly violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. The NVRA prevents states from using systematic programs to remove ineligible voters from voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election, according to the DOJ. “As the National Voter Registration Act mandates, officials across the country should take heed of the law’s crystal clear and unequivocal restrictions on systematic list maintenance efforts that fall within 90 days of an election,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement. “By cancelling voter registrations within 90 days of Election Day, Virginia places qualified voters in jeopardy of being removed from the rolls and creates the risk of confusion for the electorate.

Congress adopted the National Voter Registration Act’s quiet period restriction to prevent error-prone, eleventh hour efforts that all too often disenfranchise qualified voters,” she added. “The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy and the Justice Department will continue to ensure that the rights of qualified voters are protected.” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) slammed the DOJ over the litigation. “With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said in a statement Friday.

“Virginians – and Americans – will see this for exactly what it is: a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy. With the support of our Attorney General, we will defend these commonsense steps, that we are legally required to take, with every resource available to us. Virginia’s election will be secure and fair, and I will not stand idly by as this politically motivated action tries to interfere in our elections, period.” The DOJ lawsuit come two weeks after the department sued Alabama for removing ineligible voters from its voter rolls.

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“..the main goal of Russian diplomacy is now “crisis management and the prevention of… a truly large-scale conflict.”

• NATO Could Have Prevented Ukraine Conflict – Hungary FM (RT)

The current standoff between Russia and the West could have been avoided if NATO and the US had engaged in serious talks on Moscow’s demand for security guarantees, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has argued. In December 2021, two months before Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine, it submitted a list of security proposals to NATO and the US, insisting that the bloc withdraw its military infrastructure to the 1997 borders. The key point of the document was to halt NATO’s expansion, particularly regarding Ukraine, which has long sought to join the military bloc. However, the bloc rejected the proposal, citing its “open-door policy” on new members. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that one of the key reasons for the conflict was the threat of Kiev’s potential NATO membership.

In an interview with RIA Novosti on Saturday, Szijjarto suggested that the Russian terms could have served as a basis for avoiding the Ukraine conflict. “I remember those times. I think that what was missing there was a serious discussion… I do believe that if someone has an issue… then it should be discussed. And these discussions have not taken place, unfortunately,” the diplomat said. Szijjarto acknowledged that any debate on what might have happened is now moot, but stressed that he wishes “those dialogues had taken place. Because if they had taken place, we might not be in the situation we are right now.” In May, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Moscow’s proposal on security guarantees was no longer on the table, and that the main goal of Russian diplomacy is now “crisis management and the prevention of… a truly large-scale conflict.”

Szijjarto, along with other top Hungarian officials, have repeatedly criticized the West’s approach to the Ukraine crisis, calling on both sides to reach a ceasefire and start peace talks. He has also blasted Western sanctions against Moscow as ineffective and crippling the EU economy. Russia has never ruled out talks on Ukraine, and Putin said in June that Moscow would immediately agree to a ceasefire and start peace talks if Kiev were to withdraw troops from the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions and commit to neutrality. Later, he said that any engagement was out of the question as long as Ukrainian troops occupy part of Russia’s Kursk Region.

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“..options for fighting Russia are being continuously worked out within the bloc, military budgets of member states are being boosted, and Western economies are being militarized..”

• NATO Planning New Russia Strategy – Politico (RT)

NATO’s defense ministers will meet in Brussels next week to start rethinking the bloc’s decades-old strategy on relations with Russia, Politico has reported Despite ties between NATO and Russia hitting “rock bottom” after the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, the ‘Founding Act’ with Moscow remains in force within the US-led alliance, the outlet noted in an article on Friday. The 1997 document, which states that NATO and Russia share a common goal to “build a stable, peaceful and undivided Europe,” does not reflect the current situation, Politico wrote. During its summit in Washington in July, NATO labeled Moscow the “most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security,” while Russia continues to insist that the bloc’s eastward expansion is an “existential danger” for the country.

NATO countries are now trying to “map out different elements of [the Russia] strategy and advance the debates inside the alliance that takes us to subjects like the future of the NATO-Russia Founding Act,” a senior US official was quoted by Politico as saying. “It is time to now craft a new strategy in terms of specific positions” of the member states, the official added. Lower-level discussions on the new Russia policy have been underway for months within the bloc, and next week the issue will be addressed at the ministerial level, the report said. NATO previously announced that it planned to formulate a new strategy before its summit in The Hague, to be held next summer. “Right now we have to have an understanding across the alliance… that the [Founding Act] and the NATO-Russia Council were built for a different era, and I think the allies are prepared to say that was a different era in our relationship with Russia, and therefore something new is merited,” the US official explained.

The official described the strategy as a “political exercise,” adding that its military implications are expected to be “limited.” According to Politico, there are differences among members when it comes to the new policy towards Moscow, as some are concerned that an overly aggressive “signal” could “destabilize” Russia. There are also questions over Hungary and Slovakia, which see “strategic value” in engaging with Moscow, despite being NATO members, it added. Earlier this week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko said NATO is no longer hiding the fact that it is bracing for a potential military conflict with Moscow. Possible options for fighting Russia are being continuously worked out within the bloc, military budgets of member states are being boosted, and Western economies are being militarized, he said. It was not Russia but NATO that took “the path of confrontation” by refusing to engage in dialogue, Grushko insisted. Because of this, the US-led bloc bears full responsibility for a “major European security crisis” caused by the Ukraine conflict, he added.

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“We reset our workforce levels to align with our financial reality and to a more focused set of priorities..”

• Boeing To Fire 17,000 Employees (RT)

The US manufacturer Boeing has announced plans to eliminate around 10% of its workforce over the coming months, as the aerospace giant’s losses continue to mount and a strike undercuts the production of its best-selling planes. The job cuts will include executives and managers in addition to ordinary employees, according to a memo shared by the company’s new president and CEO Kelly Ortberg on Friday. The corporation employs nearly 170,000 people worldwide. “Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together,” said Ortberg, who became CEO of the troubled aircraft maker two months ago. A month after he took the helm, 33,000 hourly workers went on strike. “We reset our workforce levels to align with our financial reality and to a more focused set of priorities,” he added.

The “tough” decision is aimed at completing structural changes that will ensure the company’s ability to stay competitive and execute the customers’ orders over the long term, the CEO emphasized. Ortberg added that Boeing is also delaying its program to develop the 777X airplane until 2026 and halting production of its commercial 767 freighters in 2027 after fulfilling remaining orders. Earlier this week, Boeing said it had filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board against the union that represents its striking West Coast factory workers. The company emphasized that the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers had failed to bargain in good faith during the four-week work stoppage, adding that it was “issuing misinformation to its members about the status of negotiations.”

The company earlier withdrew a contract offer it had made to the striking machinists, saying that further negotiations “do not make sense at this point.” The union had previously stated that Boeing had refused to improve wages, retirement plans and vacation or sick leave. In a preliminary report on the financial results issued on Friday, the corporation said it expects to have an operating cash outflow of $1.3 billion in the third quarter, and that it will report a loss of $9.97 per share.

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Maher

 

 

Phone frogs https://twitter.com/i/status/1845086252820811853

 

 

Material girl

 

 

Voila https://twitter.com/i/status/1844929481615790263

 

 

 

 

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Sep 272024
 
 September 27, 2024  Posted by at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The bathers 1918

 

Ukraine ‘Is Gone’ – Trump (RT)
Trump Agrees To Meet Zelensky (RT)
Trump Pushes Narrative That Iran Is Trying to Kill Him (Antiwar)
US Doesn’t Want Ukraine In NATO – Erdogan (RT)
Biden Behind Nord Stream Sabotage – Russia’s Top MP (RT)
NATO Outlines Plans In Event Of War With Russia (RT)
Biden Drains Remaining Ukraine Aid Funds (RT)
US Congress ‘Happy to Be Lied to’ in Service of American Imperialism (Sp.)
Moderator for VP Debate Tied to Donations for ‘Lincoln Project’ (HUSA)
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield Praises “Make America Healthy Again” (ZH)
The Assault on America’s Defining Principles (Turley)
What Happens if We Hold College and Nobody Comes? (Turley)
Taxes and Tariffs and Trade: Trump’s Plan To Bolster The Economy (JTN)
FBI Claims it Doesn’t Have DNC’s Jan. 6 Pipe Bomb Footage (HUSA)
Appeals Court Seems Skeptical of New York Civil Fraud Suit Against Trump (ET)
FBI Specialist Urges Americans to Prepare For Hardship (MN)
Boeing Machinists on Strike Have a Historic Opportunity (Sawant)

 

 

 

 

Trump ad

 

 

Melania

 

 

Holistically

https://twitter.com/i/status/1839095068537532889

Bidenomics

 

 

Rogan Chamath

 

 

Eric Adams https://twitter.com/i/status/1839436032888221900

 

 

Bug https://twitter.com/i/status/1839019582985744422

 

 

RFK food

 

 

Loverboy

 

 

Ballots https://twitter.com/i/status/1838887620253728832

 

 

USB stick

 

 

 

 

“Millions and millions of people, including all of these great soldiers, they’re dead. Those gorgeous buildings with golden towers are demolished and lying broken on their side. Ukraine is gone. It’s not Ukraine anymore. You can never replace those cities and towns.”

• Ukraine ‘Is Gone’ – Trump (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has hammered Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky for refusing to negotiate with Russia, arguing that the country is now “obliterated” while Kiev is reduced to sending “young children and old men” to the front lines amid its conflict with Moscow. Zelensky is currently visiting the US to attend the UN General Assembly in New York and pitch his so-called ‘victory plan’ to key figures in President Joe Biden’s administration. Republican lawmakers, however, have condemned Zelensky for publicly criticizing Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. He incited further ire among Republicans when he appeared at an event at a munitions plant organized by Pennsylvania Governor Joshua Shapiro, a key ally of Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in North Carolina on Thursday, Trump accused Zelensky of “making little nasty aspersions” toward him, before turning to the Ukrainian leader’s handling of the conflict with Russia. “The country is absolutely obliterated,” he declared. “Millions and millions of people, including all of these great soldiers, they’re dead. Those gorgeous buildings with golden towers are demolished and lying broken on their side. Ukraine is gone. It’s not Ukraine anymore. You can never replace those cities and towns.” “And Biden and Kamala allowed this to happen by feeding Zelensky money and munitions like no country has ever seen before,” he continued. “But now Ukraine is running out of soldiers. They’re using young children and old men because their soldiers are dying.”

While the Ukrainian military does not publish casualty figures, the Russian Defense Ministry has estimated Kiev’s losses at around half a million men. Ukraine’s manpower shortage has been well documented by Western media outlets, and the country’s top general acknowledged earlier this month that recruits are often sent to fight after as little as six weeks’ training. Trump argued that Biden and Harris could have “easily” struck a deal with Russia to prevent the conflict from ever starting. Instead, through “a lot of bad statements and stupid statements,” Biden “egged it on.” “And we continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal,” Trump said, referring to Zelensky. “Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.”

Russia and Ukraine reportedly agreed to a peace deal during talks in Istanbul in 2022. The agreement would have involved Ukraine declaring military neutrality, limiting its armed forces, and vowing not to discriminate against ethnic Russians. In return, Moscow would have joined other leading powers in offering Ukraine security guarantees. However, Zelensky withdrew from the talks at the last moment. According to Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia, former US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and several Ukrainian media reports, the US and UK were instrumental in convincing Zelensky to abandon negotiations. Trump maintains that he would settle the conflict “in 24 hours” if elected president this November. Zelensky, however, has stated that the former president “doesn’t really know how to stop the war,” while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that he doesn’t “think there is a magic wand” that can stop the fighting overnight.

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“Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.”

• Trump Agrees To Meet Zelensky (RT)

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has announced he will meet with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky on Friday in New York. Zelensky has met with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the Democrats’ candidate for the presidency in the November election. He has also sought a meeting with Trump. “I will be meeting with him tomorrow morning at around 9:45 at Trump Tower,” the former and possibly future US president announced at a press conference in New York City on Thursday afternoon. Earlier in the day, Trump had posted a message from Ukraine’s deputy ambassador to the US, relaying Zelensky’s request for a meeting, to his TruthSocial platform. “Dear Donald, I hope you’re doing well. I recall our recent phone call – it was really good,” Zelensky wrote. “All of us in Ukraine want to end this war with a just peace. And we know that without America this is impossible to achieve.

That’s why we have to strive to understand each other and remain in close contact.” “You know I always speak with great respect about everything connected to you, and that’s how it should be,” the Ukrainian actor-turned-politician wrote, adding that he would “really like for our meeting to take place.” The request came after Trump criticized the “little nasty aspersions” Zelensky had made about him and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, in an interview published last Sunday. At a campaign rally in North Carolina, Trump described Ukraine as “absolutely obliterated” and accused Biden and Harris of “feeding Zelensky money and munitions like no country has ever seen before.” “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal,” Trump said, referring to Zelensky. “Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.”

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Not a very high level of credibility. Who feeds him this? Warmongers?!

• Trump Pushes Narrative That Iran Is Trying to Kill Him (Antiwar)

On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump pushed a narrative being spread by US intelligence officials that Iran is trying to kill him even though there’s no evidence of Iranian involvement in either attempt on his life. Trump’s campaign said they were briefed on the alleged Iranian threat by officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is led by Avril Haines. “Big threats on my life by Iran. The entire US Military is watching and waiting. Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again,” Trump wrote on X after the briefing. “Not a good situation for anyone. I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before.” The claim that Iran is plotting to kill Trump was first made by a CNN report back in July, following the assassination attempt by Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot and killed by the Secret Service.

The report acknowledged there was no evidence Crooks was linked to Iran, which was reaffirmed on Tuesday by intelligence officials speaking to The New York Times, who stressed there was no Iran connection to the July shooting. The Times report also said there was no evidence that Iran was connected in any way to Ryan Routh, who was arrested on September 15 and recently charged with attempting to assassinate Trump. Routh is a staunch supporter of the Ukraine proxy war and traveled to the country to help recruit fighters for the Ukrainian foreign legion. Despite the lack of evidence, Trump suggested at a campaign event on Wednesday that Iran might have been involved in the two assassination attempts. “As you know, there have been two assassination attempts on my life that we know of, and they may or may not involve – but possibly do – Iran,” he said at an event in North Carolina.

“If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens,” Trump added. The claims about Iran come amid soaring tensions in the Middle East as Israel has dramatically escalated its bombing campaign in Lebanon, a situation that could potentially turn into a full-blown war between the US and Iran. But Iran’s actions over the past year have shown they’re not interested in war with the US. For example, when Iran launched a reprisal attack on Israel in response to the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria, Iranian officials said they warned the US 72 hours in advance. The US denied the claim, but Turkey and Jordan confirmed they were given notice, which would have gotten back to the US. Iran and the US also engaged in indirect negotiations in Oman to avoid escalation.

Iran’s new president, Masoud Peseshkian, has also taken an extremely diplomatic tone toward the US since coming into office and wants direct negotiations with Washington. “We are not hostile towards the US. They should end their hostility towards us by showing their goodwill in practice,” Pezeshkian said last week. “We are brothers with the Americans as well.” Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) occasionally vow they will take revenge for Trump’s assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who headed the IRGC’s Quds Force. But in response to recent allegations, Iran has said Trump should be punished for the killing in a court of law. “These accusations are unsubstantiated and malicious,” Iran’s mission to the UN said in response to the CNN report in July. “From the perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Trump is a criminal who must be prosecuted and punished in a court of law for ordering the assassination of General Soleimani. Iran has chosen the legal path to bring him to justice.”

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“..the US, first and foremost, does not want to see Ukraine as a NATO member. And many NATO countries do not want Ukraine to be a member-state.”

• US Doesn’t Want Ukraine In NATO – Erdogan (RT)

The US is the main opponent of Ukraine joining NATO, although many other countries in the bloc are also against Kiev’s potential membership, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said. While Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s so-called ‘victory plan’ stresses NATO accession, Erdogan told NBC News on Wednesday that “the US, first and foremost, does not want to see Ukraine as a NATO member. And many NATO countries do not want Ukraine to be a member-state.” Zelensky is currently in the US, where is he promoting the plan and is scheduled to meet with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington on Thursday. “These are not questions to be rushed,” he added. “And when making our minds, when we are taking our decisions, we always take into consideration the stance of other NATO member states, we discuss those possible questions around the table and make the final decision accordingly,” Erdogan stated.

When asked directly if Ankara would accept Ukraine in NATO, Erdogan replied that “we are going to follow the developments, the deliberations, and reach a final decision accordingly. These are not decisions to be rushed in an excited way.” He also spoke about Türkiye’s ties with Russia, describing them as “multidimensional, political, economic, cultural, defense industry related. There are many dimensions, dimensions there and our solidarity, our interaction, has been going on and economically every day, these relations are expanding.” A unanimous decision by all members is required to expand NATO. Finland and Sweden, who became the latest nations to join the bloc in 2023 and 2024 respectively, had to overcome strong initial opposition from Türkiye, which accused them of harboring members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), considered a terrorist group by Ankara.

A senior US State Department official told AP on Tuesday that the political element of Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’ focuses on how to assure the Ukrainian population that they will be welcomed into Western institutions such as the EU and NATO, assuming they continue to fight Russia or if a negotiated settlement with Moscow is achieved. NATO declared at a 2008 summit in Bucharest that Ukraine, along with another former Soviet Republic, Georgia, would join the US-led bloc at some stage. After the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and other officials repeatedly claimed that Kiev was on track to becoming a member, but never announced a specific timeline for accession. Moscow, which views NATO as hostile and vigorously opposes its eastward expansion, highlighted Kiev’s aspirations of joining the bloc as among the main reasons for launching its military operation against Ukraine in February 2022.

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Yet another narrative (retelling) pops up: “..a privately-funded operation masterminded by a now-disgraced Ukrainian intelligence officer..”

• Biden Behind Nord Stream Sabotage – Russia’s Top MP (RT)

US President Joe Biden “was behind” the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz helped him tank his country’s economy in the aftermath, Vyacheslav Volodin, the head of the Russian State Duma, has claimed. The senior legislator commented on Thursday on the second anniversary of the explosions, which disabled the undersea connectors built to deliver Russian natural gas directly to Germany, noting the failure of European investigators to name the culprit. There have been accounts in the media suggesting possible scenarios, “which were occasionally laughable,” he said. “Washington and Biden personally were behind the Nord Stream bombing. His interest was to cut Western Europe off from cheap Russian gas and force it to buy it from America at a price three times higher,” he said.

The German economy took a hit and is now in recession due to a loss of competitiveness, Volodin added, “which means that the people of Germany were punished instead of Washington, as Biden and Scholz took money out of their pockets.” “You cannot pin this one on some ‘pro-Ukrainian group’ and civilian divers,” Volodin stressed. On Tuesday, the German news outlet Der Spiegel published its latest retelling of the events of September 2022. It mostly repeats the story that a privately-funded operation masterminded by a now-disgraced Ukrainian intelligence officer conducted the sabotage with the blessing of former General Valery Zaluzhny. The Western press has been repeating similar versions of this story for months. Spiegel claimed to have identified the divers, saying that most were civilians, but the group was led by a commando.

The operation was first contemplated years before the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022, it stated. Pulitzer Prize-winning US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that Biden had ordered the sabotage of Nord Stream in a February 2023 article. He said US military divers had secretly planted explosives to destroy the pipelines at a significant depth, using a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea as a cover. The White House has denied the accusations, but Russian officials have called the story plausible. Prior to the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2, senior US officials, including Biden, had issued threats to destroy the Russian-German pipelines.

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They’re trying to sell a story: “..a large number of frontline casualties without the capability to airlift them for treatment..”

• NATO Outlines Plans In Event Of War With Russia (RT)

NATO would have to deal with a large number of frontline casualties without the capability to airlift them for treatment in the event of a major war with Russia, its logistics chief has said. Lieutenant-General Alexander Sollfrank, the head of NATO’s Joint Support and Enabling Command (JSEC), outlined the difficulties that troops would face in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday. “The challenge will be to swiftly ensure high-quality care for, in the worst case, a great number of wounded,” Sollfrank said. The environment of a hypothetical conflict with Russia would be completely different from what the US and its allies faced in Afghanistan and Iraq, he added. Unlike insurgents in the Middle East, Russia has the military capability to threaten NATO aircraft, Sollfrank noted, predicting that medical evacuations would have to be conducted on the ground.

“For planning reasons, all options to take a great number of wounded to medical installations need to be considered, which includes trains but potentially also buses,” the NATO official said. Ukraine is currently using hospital trains to evacuate injured troops from the front line, as reported by CNN earlier this month. The NATO logistics command, which is based in the southern German town of Ulm, recently staged an exercise based on coordinating medical evacuations, Reuters said. JSEC contingency plans would require a legal foundation for issues such as the expedited transportation of narcotics across national borders, Sollfrank said. He also called for a ‘military medical Schengen’ – similarly to how the bloc needs a ‘military Schengen’ to rapidly deploy troops and weapons to the eastern flank, according to the official.

The US and its allies have claimed that Russia may be planning to attack NATO, and that the West can delay or prevent that outcome by arming Ukraine. The bloc has been expanding in Europe for decades, in violation of assurances given before Moscow agreed to German reunification in 1990. The Russian government has cited NATO’s approach to its borders and the bloc’s intention to add Kiev to its ranks as key causes of the Ukraine conflict. Officials in Moscow have denied having any aggressive intentions toward NATO, which they consider a hostile force that must be deterred.

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“The mechanisms allow payments to arms manufacturers and permit weapons to be drawn directly from American military stockpiles..”

• Biden Drains Remaining Ukraine Aid Funds (RT)

US President Joe Biden announced nearly $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine on Thursday, releasing the remaining funding authorized by Congress. Lawmakers recently declined to extend the availability of certain funds beyond next week’s deadline. The funding includes $2.4 billion under the Pentagon’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and $5.5 billion under the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA). The mechanisms allow payments to arms manufacturers and permit weapons to be drawn directly from American military stockpiles. The latter sum was set to expire at the end of this month, which marks the end of the fiscal year in the US. The White House had hoped that the US Congress would allow the PDA money to be spent at a later point. However, legislation passed on Wednesday did not include any such clause, reportedly following resistance from Republicans skeptical of the continued bankrolling of Kiev.

Biden announced the decision on military aid during a meeting with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, who is in the US to promote his ‘victory plan’ in the conflict with Russia. Zelensky has said he wanted the US president to be the first to see the proposal as it heavily relies on American aid. According to the Wall Street Journal, US officials have previewed the plan but found it “unimpressive.” The US president said Kiev will receive an additional Patriot surface-to-air system, more munitions and drones, as well as a new capability, the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW). The glide bomb has a range of up to 130km when dropped from a high-flying aircraft. Some supporters of Kiev’s cause have criticized the 11th-hour drawdown of funds by Biden. Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Missouri, claimed it was “typical of this administration to wait until the last possible moment to announce full use of the PDA.”

Zelensky’s visit also triggered complaints from members of the GOP, after he criticized the Republican presidential ticket and visited an ammunition factory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, without a single Republican official present. Senior party members have accused the Ukrainian leader of campaigning for the Democrats. They also alleged that the Biden administration facilitated potential meddling in the 2024 presidential election by organizing Zelensky’s Pennsylvania visit and spending taxpayer money on it.

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“..most of Congress was very happy to be lied to and would have denounced Blinken for the truth.”

• US Congress ‘Happy to Be Lied to’ in Service of American Imperialism (Sp.)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is facing calls to resign after a damning report suggested he willfully misled Congress to keep US military aid flowing to Israel. Analysis by the investigative reporting nonprofit ProPublica revealed that Blinken defied the findings of multiple government bodies that concluded Israel was deliberately blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Blinken ignored the advice of multiple officials with the State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID), testifying before lawmakers that Tel Aviv was not interfering with the flow of aid. US law forbids the provision of military equipment to any country obstructing American humanitarian assistance. Journalists Dan Lazare and Robert Fantina joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Wednesday to discuss the scandal, which has led the director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations to call on Blinken to resign.

“This is business as usual,” said Fantina. “The United States doesn’t respect international law and doesn’t respect its own laws if those laws somehow get in the way of its quest for power and profits. So the fact that Blinken lied to Congress, blatantly lied – and this wasn’t something that was inconsequential, this caused the starvation, the continued starvation and the slaughter of innocent people.” “We’ve said before that the United States is enabling this genocide by continuing to arm Israel and by increasing its arms shipments to Israel,” he continued. “So the fact that Blinken is lying should really surprise no one. Other international organizations that aren’t affiliated with any nation have said repeatedly for months that Israel is blocking humanitarian aid. And yet the United States denies this, or at least Blinken did.”

The human rights organization Amnesty International affirmed Israel was stemming the flow of humanitarian assistance earlier this year, characterizing Tel Aviv’s actions as a “tightening” of its “16-year-long suffocating blockade” of Gaza. Israel has tightly controlled the amount of food and other basic necessities allowed to enter the Palestinian territory since June 2007, when it decided to dismantle its settlements in the Gaza Strip. However, Israel has exerted control over the strip of land, which is considered sovereign Palestinian territory under international law, since 1967, when it seized land intended to form the basis of a Palestinian state in the region. The US has served as the country’s strongest backer in the decades since, with Israel becoming the United States’ largest cumulative recipient of foreign aid. Observers claim the US backs the country as a crucial beachhead in a geopolitically vital region where Israel serves as a proxy for US interests against Iran and other adversaries.

“Israel is engaged in a brutal war, which is now spreading dramatically and it will continue doing so,” said Lazare, claiming Israel is inarguably using the flow of humanitarian aid as an instrument of war. “It’s all irrelevant. I mean, war is the cessation of law, and, therefore, calling on warmakers to obey the law strikes me as kind of contradictory.” “If you’re acting on behalf of the [US] government or any kind of imperialism, you are free to lie to Congress at will, the laws against lying to Congress only apply to those which the empire sees as a threat,” posited host Garland Nixon. “Congress does not mind being lied to if it thinks it benefits the empire,” Lazare agreed. “In general there are lies Congress likes and lies Congress doesn’t like. And, therefore, it’s Congress’ power of decision, power to decide which lies are okay and which lies are not. And generally the okay ones are those that further America’s imperial ambitions.” Sam Perlo-Freeman, a researcher with the group Campaign Against Arms Trade, agreed, claiming simply, “most of Congress was very happy to be lied to and would have denounced Blinken for the truth.”

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“..it quickly became clear that some of its members were growing increasingly unhinged with Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

• Moderator for VP Debate Tied to Donations for ‘Lincoln Project’ (HUSA)

The husband of one of the two moderators in next week’s CBS News debate featuring vice presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz appears to have made two donations of $250 apiece to the controversial Lincoln Project during the 2020 election. Records from the Federal Election Commission show that Ali “Yado” Yakub, the husband of Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, contributed on July 2 and Sept. 26 of that year to the anti-Trump super-PAC. Voting records confirmed that the address listed was the residence of Yakub, who was registered as a Republican, and Brennan, who was registered as an independent.Many have observed that registration offers no indication about political preference, with Democrats during the recent primary—in which President Joe Biden ran largely uncontested—frequently changing their party identification to vote against Trump.

Yakub also made contributions to ActBlue in 2019, including two that were earmarked for the primary campaign of future Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Headline USA reached out to both Brennan and Yakub by phone and email but received no response. The Lincoln Project—founded by high-profile NeverTrump ex-Republicans Rick Wilson, George T. Conway III, Steve Schmidt, Reed Galen, John Weaver and Jennifer Horn—initially appeared to be a sort of principled response by members of the GOP establishment to Trump’s takeover of the party. However, it quickly became clear that some of its members were growing increasingly unhinged with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The group lost all credibility when, in January 2021, allegations emerged that co-founder John Weaver had engaged in sexual impropriety with young, male staffers and had allegedly solicited boys as young as 14. The bombshell led to an exodus of the group’s more influential figures, such as former John McCain campaign chief Steve Schmidt, who had become a registered Democrat the month prior. Only two of its charter members—Rick Wilson and Reed Galen—are currently associated with the group, which has grown more radical and outlandish, notoriously engaging in a stunt in which it staged a fake neo-Nazi rally and attempted to blame Trump supporters.

It also has run ads pushing blatant disinformation, such as attempting to suggest that Trump would monitor and arrest people for attempting to obtain an abortion. Trump has repeatedly emphasized that the issue is now at the state level and will remain so if he is re-elected, while noting that he personally favors exceptions for abortions in a set of specific, narrowly tailored circumstances. Moreover, the Lincoln Project has sought to falsely tie Trump to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which he has repeatedly disavowed and denied any association with. The project launched in April 2023, well before Trump was the presumptive nominee, and was designed as a series of policy proposals for use by whichever candidate prevailed.

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“Maybe it was a warning sign when big pharma and the feds pushed Ozempic as the ‘wonder shot’ to end the obesity crisis..”

• Former CDC Director Robert Redfield Praises “Make America Healthy Again” (ZH)

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, who served during the Trump administration, wrote an editorial in Newsweek praising President Trump’s decision to join forces with Robert Kennedy Jr. to “make America healthy again.” “We know chronic disease is more than 75 percent of the country’s $4 trillion annual health care expenditure. Unfortunately, we have become a sick nation. We’re paying too much for chronic disease, and this must change. It’s time to make America healthy again,” Redfield wrote in the op-ed published on Tuesday. After more than four decades in public health, Redfield believes the former president “chose the right man [RFK Jr.] for the job” to combat the processed foods industrial complex, which has ignited an obesity crisis across the Heartland.

“For instance, obesity in American children has increased dramatically since John F. Kennedy’s presidency, from around 4 percent in the 1960s to almost 20 percent in 2024,” he said, adding, “The causes of childhood obesity are complex, but a primary origin is clearly the modern American diet of highly processed foods.” He explained the causes for this obesity crisis are primarily due to “special interest and corporate influences on our federal agencies.” Redfield pointed out that “Kennedy is right” about the corporate capture problem of federal agencies.

Kennedy is right: All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA’s budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies. NIH is cozy with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and its scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs NIH licenses to pharma. And as the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I know the agency can be influenced by special interest groups. Redfield acknowledges that agency capture is a serious issue, highlighting that federal agencies responsible for regulating food and medicine are possibly compromised by the food industrial complex and big pharma. Maybe it was a warning sign when big pharma and the feds pushed Ozempic as the ‘wonder shot’ to end the obesity crisis instead of promoting exercise and safe, clean food.

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Enemies of the Constitution. They will end the country.

“..an explosion of books and articles laying out a new vision of “democracy” unconstrained by constitutional limits on majority power..”

• The Assault on America’s Defining Principles (Turley)

Kamala Harris declared in Tuesday’s debate that a vote for her is a vote “to end the approach that is about attacking the foundations of our democracy ’cause you don’t like the outcome.” She was alluding to the 2021 Capitol riot, but she and her party are also attacking the foundations of our democracy: the Supreme Court and the freedom of speech. Several candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination, including Ms. Harris, said they were open to the idea of packing the court by expanding the number of seats. Mr. Biden opposed the idea, but a week after he exited the 2024 presidential race, he announced a “bold plan” to “reform” the high court. It would pack the court via term limits and also impose a “binding code of conduct,” aimed at conservative justices. Ms. Harris quickly endorsed the proposal in a statement, citing a “clear crisis of confidence” in the court owing to “decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent.”

She might as well have added “because you don’t like the outcome.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) has already introduced ethics and term-limits legislation and said Ms. Harris’s campaign has told him “that your bills are precisely aligned with what we are talking about.” The attacks on the court are part of a growing counterconstitutional movement that began in higher education and seems recently to have reached a critical mass in the media and politics. The past few months have seen an explosion of books and articles laying out a new vision of “democracy” unconstrained by constitutional limits on majority power. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, is author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” published last month. In a 2021 Los Angeles Times op-ed, he described conservative justices as “partisan hacks.”

In the New York Times, book critic Jennifer Szalai scoffs at what she calls “Constitution worship.” She writes: “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.” She frets that by limiting the power of the majority, the Constitution “can end up fostering the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.” In a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” Others have railed against individual rights. In my new book on free speech, I discuss this movement against what many professors deride as “rights talk.” Barbara McQuade of the University of Michigan Law School has called free speech America’s “Achilles’ heel.”

In another Times op-ed, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control,” Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, asserts that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.” George Washington University Law’s Mary Ann Franks complains that the First Amendment (and also the Second) is too “aggressively individualistic” and endangers “domestic tranquility” and “general welfare.” Mainstream Democrats are listening to radical voices. “How much does the current structure benefit us?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said in 2021, explaining her support for a court-packing bill.

“I don’t think it does.” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said at the Democratic National Committee’s “LGBTQ+ Kickoff” that “we’ve got to reimagine” democracy “in a way that is more revolutionary than . . . that little piece of paper.” Both AOC and Ms. Robinson later spoke to the convention itself. The Nation’s Elie Mystal calls the Constitution “trash” and urges the abolition of the U.S. Senate. Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law School complains that Americans are “slaves” to the Constitution.

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“..many departments have purged their ranks of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians.”

• What Happens if We Hold College and Nobody Comes? (Turley)

In the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht asked “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” As someone who has been a teacher for over 30 years, I find myself increasingly asking the same question as trust and enrollments fall in higher education. Trust in higher education is plummeting to record lows. According to recent polling, there has been a record drop in trust in higher education since just 2015. Not surprisingly, given the growing viewpoint intolerance on our campuses, the largest drops are among Republicans and Independents. There has been a precipitous decline in enrollments across the country as universities worry about covering their costs without raising already high tuition rates. From 2010 to 2021, enrollments fell from roughly 18.1 million students to about 15.4 million. There are various contributors to the drop from falling birthrates to poor economic times.

However, there is also an increasing view of higher education as an academic echo chamber for far left agendas. For many, there is little appeal in going to campuses where you are expected to self-censor and professors reject your values as part of their lesson plans. That fear is magnified by surveys showing that many departments have purged their ranks of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians. In my new book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculties replicate their own views and values. One survey (based on self-reporting) found that only nine percent of law professors identified as conservative. Some anti-free speech advocates are actually citing higher education as a model for social media in showing how “unlikeable voices” have been eliminated.

Many of those “unlikeable” people are now going elsewhere as schools focus on degrees in activism and denouncing math, statistics, the classics, and even meritocracy as examples of white privilege. Schools offering classic education are experiencing rising enrollments, but the growing crisis has not changed the bias in hiring and teaching. Despite repeated losses in courts, universities and colleges continue to deny free speech and diversity of thought. The fact is that this academic echo chamber may be killing educational institutions, but the intolerance still works to the advantage of faculty who can control publications, speaking opportunities, and advancement with like-minded ideologues. We have seen the same perverse incentive in the media where media outlets are seeing plummeting readers and revenue.

Journalism schools and editors now maintain that reporters should reject objectivity and neutrality as touchstones of journalism. It does not matter that this advocacy journalism is killing the profession. Reporters and editors continue to saw at the limb upon which they sit due to the same advantage for academics. For reporters, converting newsrooms into echo chambers gives them more security, advancement, and opportunities. Recently, the new Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis was brought into the paper to right the ship. He told the staff “let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.” The response from reporters was to call for owner Jeff Bezos to fire Lewis and others seeking to change the culture.

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“I will give you the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the lowest regulatory burden and free access to the best and biggest market on the planet, but only if you make your product here in America.”

• Taxes and Tariffs and Trade: Trump’s Plan To Bolster The Economy (JTN)

In a bid to build a broader coalition, former President Donald Trump has outlined a vision of tax cuts, import tariffs, and “reciprocal trade” to preserve and restore American industries. Since coming down the escalator of Trump Tower in 2015, the Republican standard bearer has espoused unconventional trade policies and dragged much of the GOP kicking and screaming toward protectionism. His tenure saw the U.S. renegotiate trade agreements with its neighbors, resulting in the United States, Mexico, Canada Agreement (USMCA), while also waging a trade war with China seeking to curb some of Beijing’s abuses. His signature tax plan, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, saw the doubling of the standard deduction and the reduction of the corporate tax rate to 21%. As he has sought to contrast himself with Harris, Trump has highlighted both elements of his economic plan and doubled down on the tax cuts and tariffs approach.

“So, as your president, here is the deal that I will be offering to every major company and manufacturer on Earth,” he said at a Tuesday event in Savannah, Ga. “I will give you the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the lowest regulatory burden and free access to the best and biggest market on the planet, but only if you make your product here in America.” “It all goes away if you don’t make your product here and hire American workers for the job,” he warned. His message, so far, appears to have resonated with working class voters, notably the traditionally Democratic-leaning union workers. After internal polling showed that its members decidedly favored Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to endorse a candidate, marking the first time in decades that the union had not backed a Democrat for president.

In recent weeks, Trump has unveiled a litany of tax relief proposals, most of which involve either simplifying the system or eliminating taxation on certain sources of income entirely. Speaking at a New York rally last week, Trump vowed to restore state-and-local-tax (SALT) deductions for federal tax returns in an about-face after signing the TCJA, which imposed a $10,000 cap on SALT deductions. “I will cut taxes for families, small businesses and workers, including restoring the SALT deduction, saving thousands of dollars for residents of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other high cost states,” he said. Earlier this month, he pledged to eliminate all taxes on overtime work as well, saying “[t]he people who work overtime are among the hardest working citizens in our country … It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break.”

Trump has also promised to end taxation on Social Security benefits, a proposal that has drawn broad support from the public across most age brackets, according to recent polling. Among the most notable of his campaign pitches, however, has been a pledge to eliminate taxes on tips, which he announced at a June rally in Nevada in a bid to win over service workers in the critical battleground. Separate from pledging further tax cuts, he has also made the TCJA a central fixture of his campaign. Many of the act’s cuts are set to expire next year and he has begun to focus on the adverse impacts for taxpayers of permitting those cuts to sunset.

Using information from the Tax Foundation, the Trump campaign this month launched a website, dubbed kamalataxincrease.com, breaking down the average cost to tax-paying families by state. The site estimates that a Harris-proposed tax plan would cost families an average of $2,580.57 in additional taxes per year. The TCJA lowered the corporate tax rate to 21%, but Trump vowed to go further in his Tuesday speech, promising a “manufacturing Renaissance” through a “15% Made in America tax rate.” “We’re cutting the business tax from 21% to 15% which makes us the most competitive tax anywhere on the planet, but only for those who make their product in the USA. See, that’s an incentive,” he said. “[P]eople are going to be pouring in. Companies are going to be pouring in.”

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They’re trying to run out the clock. “Massie then called for answers on the matter before Election Day.”

• FBI Claims it Doesn’t Have DNC’s Jan. 6 Pipe Bomb Footage (HUSA)

The FBI has claimed that it doesn’t have the Democratic National Committee headquarters’ security footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill uprising—footage that would presumably show the discovery of a pipe bomb that was allegedly planted outside the DNC the night before. The FBI’s admission was revealed in a Friday letter from Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari to Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. In that letter, Cuffari said he asked the FBI to review the DNC security videos from Jan. 6—but was told that the bureau doesn’t have that footage. “On March 18, 2022, the FBI informed DHS OIG that it did not have any video footage from January 6, 2021,” Cuffari told Massie.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1838980352901079550

The letter to Massie was revealed Tuesday, the same day Revolver News published a report suggesting that the DNC pipe bomb footage was tampered with. Revolver reported that an unnamed DHS-OIG official viewed the DNC footage, and said that the footage clearly shows the pipe bomber planting a device on the evening of Jan. 5—something that the footage released by the FBI to the public doesn’t show. Revolver also reported that the DHS-OIG official had to go to the DNC to view the footage—raising questions about why the FBI doesn’t have video of one of the most significant crimes from the whole Jan. 6 fiasco. “We can only conclude that either the FBI is lying and did have footage, or they’re telling the truth and for some reason deleted the footage,” Revolver wrote on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris continues to be tight-lipped on the subject, despite the fact that her motorcade drove past the DNC pipe bomb on Jan. 6.

Harris left the Capitol at 11:21 a.m. arrived to the DNC at 11:25 a.m., but the nearby pipe bomb wasn’t discovered until 1:07 p.m. by a plainclothes Capitol Police officer. Some J6 researchers argue that Harris’s silence on the issue suggests that the U.S. government is engaging in a coverup with the pipe bomb case—perhaps because a government asset planted the bombs, or for some other unknown reason. On Tuesday, Massie raised that possibility again. “It’s almost as if they don’t want to know. Can you rule out that there were any confidential human sources involved in the whole pipe bomb thing?” Massie asked DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Horowitz said he didn’t “recall” whether any government assets were involved, but he’d have to go back and refresh his memory. Massie then called for answers on the matter before Election Day.

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“Mar-a-Lago is worth $18-26 million”. That alone closes the case.

• Appeals Court Seems Skeptical of New York Civil Fraud Suit Against Trump (ET)

Appeals judges in New York fielded multiple questions to the New York Attorney General’s Office on Sept. 26 indicating that they were skeptical of its application of an anti-fraud law to former President Donald Trump’s business practices. The questions came during oral arguments over Trump’s claims that the state Supreme Court erred in handling the civil fraud case, which resulted in a $489 million penalty for the former president. Trump’s attorney in the case, D. John Sauer, told a five-judge panel in the court’s appellate division that the judge and prosecutors flouted time limits on the claims involved. He noted that Attorney General Letitia James’s office pressed an overly broad interpretation of legally punishable fraud and that, regardless, the former president hadn’t committed fraud in his dealings with banks and others. Some of the judges questioned whether the state was acting within the bounds of its authority or had a legitimate interest in bringing the suit.

Justice David Friedman pressed New York Deputy Solicitor General Judith Vale on whether there was any precedent for the attorney general suing over transactions involving sophisticated parties where neither “lost any money. “Every case that you cite involves damage to consumers, damage to the marketplace. … We don’t have anything like that here,” Friedman said. Vale argued that “there was absolutely a public impact and a public interest here.” “There are at least four different public harms from the kind of misconduct here,” she said. Vale also said that “when risk is injected into the market, that does hurt the counterparties and it does hurt the market as a whole.” Justice Peter Moulton asked, “How do we draw a line, or at least [put up] some guardrails to know when the AG is operating well within her broad, admittedly broad sphere of 63(12)?”

Moulton was referring to New York Executive Law 63(12), which is the statute James used in suing Trump. The statute allows the attorney general to apply for court intervention when “any person shall engage in repeated fraudulent or illegal acts or otherwise demonstrate persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business.” Part of Sauer’s argument was that the attorney general’s conception of fraud was too loose and noted that no one was victimized by Trump’s conduct. At one point, he told the court that under existing precedent, “there has to be a capacity or tendency to deceive, or atmosphere conducive to fraud.” “And what we’ve pointed out is that you have a situation where there were no victims, no complaints,” he said, also saying that Trump’s business partners did their due diligence.

Presiding Justice Dianne Renwick was skeptical that the statute required some kind of harm in order to prove fraudulent activity. She read the relevant portion of the statute and told Vale: “I don’t read harm or threat of harm in that, but the other side is saying that that is to be read into this statute. “Are there any cases where the language harm or threat to harm limits the scope of the attorney general?” Vale said that there weren’t “as to liability and not in cases like this where what the attorney general is seeking injunctive relief and disgorgement.”

Trump is currently facing a disgorgement of $489 million with interest accruing by the day. During oral arguments, Vale encountered multiple questions about the appropriateness of the disgorgement. Moulton told Vale that the disgorgement amount was “troubling.” “How do you tether the amount that was assessed by [the] Supreme Court to the harm that was caused here, where the parties left these transactions happy about how things went down?” he asked. Vale responded that “disgorgement looks at taking the gain away from the wrongdoer.” Although the amount was high, she said that “there was a lot of fraud … and illegality.”

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Posted the video yesterday. Here’s some backgroud added in.

• FBI Specialist Urges Americans to Prepare For Hardship (MN)

A former FBI specialist who was persecuted for questioning January 6 said during a hearing with lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Americans should stock up on food and prepare for hardship. Marcus Allen, a former FBI staff operations specialist, told the Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government that he was deliberately targeted by higher ups for asking why there were so many federal informants in the crowd at the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. “The FBI questioned my allegiance to the United States, suspended my security clearance, suspended my pay and refused to allow me to obtain outside employment or even accept charity,” Allen testified The feds came down hard on Allen after he sent an email on September 21st, 2021 which his supervisors claimed contained hyperlinks to “extremist propaganda” from “questionable sources”.

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who testified alongside Allen, is investigating the FBI’s security clearance and adjudication process, including the targeting of “political conservatives who were seen as loyal to Trump or resistant to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.” “There are no words strong enough to describe the impact the FBI’s lies about me have had on me and my family,” said Allen during an emotional statement. “The stress has taken a toll on our health and our children have suffered, traumatized by the thought of our door getting kicked in or Dad not coming home.” Allen added even more ominously: “This is a warning, to the American people I say.. I personally have no confidence the FBI will reign in its own conduct.” However, it was Allen’s final comments that raised many eyebrows.

The former FBI staffer urged Americans to use their right to vote despite any doubts they may have about election integrity. “My other recommendations are in the natural order,” Allen continued, “Arm yourself and know how to defend yourself, make three to four friends in your neighborhood and promise to come to each other’s mutual aid in times of hardship.” “And during the great depression, people stocked up their pantry, so I think that’s a good practice especially in our economic times, and make sure you have three to four months of food,” he added. Allen also urged Americans to pray and read the bible regularly.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1839479175415283734

https://twitter.com/i/status/1838976194433405052

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Boeing can’t afford any of this.

• Boeing Machinists on Strike Have a Historic Opportunity (Sawant)

In a potentially game-changing move, 33,000 Boeing machinists in the Pacific Northwest, unionized with IAM District 751, are on strike after rejecting the company’s initial insulting contract offer. A stunning 96 percent of the rank and file voted to go on strike, marking a sea change for the fight of working people at Boeing. For decades, Boeing’s executives and wealthy shareholders have, with the active help from Democrats and Republicans in Washington state and Washington D.C., enforced a decades-long brutal regime that has thrown both workers and safety standards under the bus in favor of short-term profit maximization for themselves. The strike offers an opening for the company’s workers to win historic gains and begin rebuilding a fighting union with a militant, active rank-and-file membership.

Like workers everywhere, Boeing machinists are fighting for decent wages and benefits in the face of the sky-high cost of living. The workers are demanding a 40 percent wage increase, which is the bare minimum they need given the ground they have lost in past sell-out contracts from the bosses, combined with historic inflation levels and high living costs in the region. They are angry at Boeing’s shell games, including the attempt to take away their annual employee bonuses (called “AMPP”), which they were promised in return for being forced to accept higher healthcare costs in a past contract. They are also demanding an end to the intolerable regime of mandatory overtime, which is running rampant at Boeing, denying workers the right to a life outside of work. The machinists are also fighting for a restoration of defined benefit pension, and full and retroactive reinstatement of pension for all workers.

The initial contract offer from the Boeing bosses came nowhere close to meeting these demands. What Boeing touted as a 25 percent raise over four years in the contract offer is, in reality, much less. When coupled with the cost of living and the removal of the annual AMPP bonus, the proposed raises don’t even make up for recent and future inflation, much less the severe blows from past contracts. The offer also fails to restore workers’ pensions.Since the strike began, Boeing has been forced to release a second contract offer, which includes a 30 percent pay increase over the next 4 years, up from 25 percent in the last offer. The strike has also forced Boeing to back down from their attempt to take away workers’ annual bonuses. But this new offer is still far less than what workers have been demanding and what they need, and workers immediately responded both on the picket line and in social media with their strong opposition to this totally inadequate offer, saying they must continue the strike.

The union leadership has now come out with a statement that says as much also, and which condemns the disgraceful way in which Boeing has attempted to undemocratically circumvent the union with this offer. Because of this, they are rejecting this new offer outright.In the Seattle area, a job at Boeing used to be highly sought after — it was a path to decent wages and benefits and relative stability. A common phrase among workers was “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.” With the attacks over the last 15 years, many new Boeing workers are instead being paid less than the Seattle minimum wage, and the company has had higher and higher turnover. These attacks on the workforce have gone hand-in-hand with the corporation’s major struggles in recent years with safety and quality control.

The strike comes in the wake of the machinists being sold out in a spectacularly shameful deal made over a decade ago in November 2013 by Boeing executives and shareholders with the Democratic Party-dominated Washington State Legislature, and Democratic Governor, Jay Inslee. The defined benefit pension plan, won by the unionized machinists in previous decades, was eliminated in one fell swoop. A defined benefit plan, which is currently accessible only to a small proportion of the workforce in the private sector and which was won through labor struggle, is a plan that guarantees retired workers a decent income for life. This was replaced by Boeing with a far weaker 401(K) retirement system that leaves workers at the mercy of the ups and downs of the stock market. This dramatically undermines annual retirement income, as well as shifting the risk away from the executives and major shareholders of big corporations like Boeing onto the backs of working people.

The Democratic Party justified this historic attack on both the Boeing machinists and working people statewide by claiming that it was necessary to save jobs. Boeing executives had carried out public extortion, threatening to take away the final assembly of the 777X aircraft out of Washington state, which would eliminate an estimated 10,000 union jobs. State and local Democrats from across the region insisted that the machinists accept the contract, and scandalously told them that if they didn’t, they would be responsible for not only the loss of their own jobs, but also the broader economic repercussions if Boeing were to move future production out of state.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Shots

 

 

Hurricane

https://twitter.com/i/status/1839079306586386738

 

 

Not impresssed https://twitter.com/i/status/1839397581476257900

 

 

Jaguar https://twitter.com/i/status/1839477559148322995

 

 

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Sep 102024
 


Pieter Bruegel the Elder Children’s games 1560

 

Harris Team Drafts Trump Stand-in For Debate Prep – WaPo (RT)
There’s No Debate (Quoth the Raven)
Suggestions for Trump in His Debate with Kamala (Paul Craig Roberts)
Professors Rally Academics Around ‘Less Bad’ Candidate Trump (Caldwell)
Trump Repeats Putin Bribe (Helmer)
Nuland Confirms West Told Zelensky To Abandon Peace Deal (RT)
Democrats Aren’t Creating Disorder; They’re Preserving it (Turley)
The Prosecution of Elon Musk for “Undermining” the Federal Government (Turley)
Enabling a “Brutus” to Slay the Elon Musk “Caesar” (Alastair Crooke)
Russia Remains Hackers’ Top Target for Past 2.5 Years – Kaspersky (Sp.)
Trump Unveils Plan To Stop De-Dollarization (RT)
Boeing Offers Staff 25% Pay Hike In Bid To Avoid Strike (BBC)
Germany Announces Tougher Border Controls (RT)

 

 

 

 

Free speech https://twitter.com/i/status/1832786512422764937

 

 

Tucker Cheney

 

 

Burgum

 

 

Google

 

 

Judge Joe Brown

 

 

Sen. John Kennedy https://twitter.com/i/status/1832757264869896389

 

 

Dinesh

 

 

 

 

 

 

He also prepped Hillary in 2016. We know how that went.

They’ll try to trigger Trump. It’s all they got.

• Harris Team Drafts Trump Stand-in For Debate Prep – WaPo (RT)

US Vice President Kamala Harris has spent several days intensively preparing for the upcoming presidential debate against Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump, the Washington Post wrote on Monday. Harris’ team has brought in a longtime Democratic operative to ‘play’ Trump during the sessions, the report said. Harris and Trump are set for their first face-off on Tuesday night, an event held at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center and hosted by ABC News. According to the Post, Harris has made few public appearances in recent days, instead spending most of them instead at an intensive “debate camp” in Pittsburgh’s Omni William Penn Hotel. Her aides have reportedly created a mock set-up to mimic the layout of the debate studio.

They also “cast a veteran Donald Trump stand-in to unleash harsh attacks and offensive comments; and put the vice president through hours of rehearsed questions,” the paper wrote. That stand-in is Philippe Reines, a longtime Hillary Clinton aide. Reines had initially been enlisted to play Senator J.D. Vance when Harris was set to face him in the vice-presidential debate before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. “Now that Harris has ascended to the top of the ticket and will face Trump, Reines has stayed on to play the former president, reprising the role he played for Clinton during her 2016 debate preparations,” the paper wrote. Trump, who on Tuesday will participate in his seventh general election debate since 2016, appears to have taken a different approach to debate prep.

According to the Post, the former president spent much of the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, opting for “policy sessions” with aides. The Republican nominee does not like the public perception that he is practicing at all, according to his advisers, the Post said. Those aides said Trump views rallies and interviews as the best preparation for the debate. Trump’s debate with the 81-year-old Biden in June ended the latter’s campaign on July 21 amid widespread concern about his age and fitness for office. The stumbling debate performance against Trump and numerous gaffes led to Biden’s withdrawal from the race and his endorsement of Harris. She formally accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination at its national convention in Chicago last month. The vice president has this week suffered a fall in the polls for the first time since becoming her party’s presidential candidate. A New York Times/Siena poll released on Sunday showed Trump edging out Harris 48% to 47% among likely voters nationally.

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“I believe strongly in everybody’s right to prioritize whatever they like in their lives. We used to call that freedom and, in this country, it’s supposed to be sacrosanct…”

• There’s No Debate (Quoth the Raven)

As the news trucks and security details begin lining the streets of my neighborhood in Philadelphia, obstructing traffic and causing general chaos over the next few days leading into tomorrow’s debate, part of me wonders if I’m being crass and partisan when I shrug and wonder what there is to actually debate. As I wrote about last week, the substance of what Kamala Harris is going to bring to the debate stage tomorrow night will have very little to do with policy and will instead likely rely on jabs about Trump’s personality, mistruths about media hoaxes like Charlottesville, and statements ascribing to Trump things he has publicly disavowed, like Project 2025. This gaslighting campaign will likely be combined with strategic flip-flopping to acquiesce to policy positions that were Trump’s to begin with. We’ve already seen this leading into the debate.

First, it was stealing the “no tax on tips” policy, then it was reversing her stance on fracking, then it was claiming she’s not for an electric vehicle mandate, and then it was using photographs of Trump’s border wall in advertisements, claiming she is tough on immigration. It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t instead deeply, deeply sad for our country. The cold, hard facts are that when it comes to policy, there is no debate – and so tomorrow turns mostly into an exercise on how to run a crisis public relations campaign by Kamala Harris while Trump does what he always does: bludgeons his way forward ruthlessly. Trump will say what he’s been saying for the better part of a decade, with little change, and Harris will attempt to present a $2,500/hour McKinsey consulting, focus group approved, slide deck book report on a book she clearly hasn’t read.

As I said to Andy Schectman on our podcast this weekend, I can understand voting for a Democrat if your number one priority is abortion. If the right to be able to get an abortion in all 50 states at any time, for any reason, is the most important thing in your life, it makes sense to me that you would vote Democrat. Even though Trump reportedly won’t push for a national abortion ban and has taken the stand that he only wants to move the decision back to the states, there is still a significant amount of “my body, my choice” fear after the Roe vs. Wade repeal, ironically, from many people on the left who were perfectly fine with trampling on people’s rights to travel, work and otherwise live their lives due to vaccine mandates. I don’t pretend to understand how that could outweigh all the numerous other issues that would heavily impact our quality of life for some people.

I believe strongly in everybody’s right to prioritize whatever they like in their lives. We used to call that freedom and, in this country, it’s supposed to be sacrosanct. And so there’s my one concession for the left side of the aisle: abortion. When it comes to almost every other major key issue, when understood properly, to me there really is no debate. There’s no doubt that the country experienced an incredible surge in illegal immigration over the last four years under the Biden-Harris regime. If you are pro-undocumented, illegal immigrants, who rely on taxpayer cash to get by and who take jobs and opportunities from both existing citizens and legal immigrants, then I argue that you don’t understand the problem well enough. Emotionally, it’s a lovely gesture to say something like “no human being is illegal,” but when Haitians start taking over your small town, cutting the heads off of park geese to eat them, while sleeping on mattresses on your front lawn or living in 5-star hotels on taxpayer cash, the reality of a country bloated with illegal immigrants becomes clearer.

On the issue, there really is no comparison: Kamala Harris was not tough on the border and, on the contrary, actively fought against Texas when they tried to secure their own border. Though his rhetoric may be uncomfortable to some emotional amoebae who have little understanding of how the real world works, Donald Trump kept the country secure and made the border a top priority to his presidency. To me, there’s no debate on who handled this issue better.

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“..in America law is a shield of the people, but that the Democrats have turned it into a weapon in the hands of the state..”

• Suggestions for Trump in His Debate with Kamala (Paul Craig Roberts)

Now that a debate is back on schedule for Tuesday September 10, I have these suggestions for Trump: Trump must leave Kamala alone and address issues whether or not she does. If he attacks Kamala, certainly a target, American women will vote against him. Trump should stress the open border problem with immigrant-invader gangs now seizing apartment houses and homes in blue jurisdictions, and with hotels, motels, school gyms, and bus and airport terminals full of immigrant-invaders who have no where to go except to the existing housing stock where illegal occupancy in blue jurisdictions is merely a “landlord-tenant issue.” You go pick up your kid from school and on your return your home is occupied by armed immigrant-invaders. The police tell you that it is not a police matter. Trump should have the news reports at hand.

Trump should stress that pushing against Russia and China invites nuclear war that threatens the entire world and has to stop. The power of nuclear weapons leaves no room for cultivating hostility between countries. Trump should say that Israel has hurt its reputation by its unrestrained assault on Gaza and the West bank and is making it difficult for America to continue its unconditional support of its ally. Israel needs to understand that there are limits on what Washington can support. Trump should emphasize that in America law is a shield of the people, but that the Democrats have turned it into a weapon in the hands of the state, a weapon unjustly used against the many who are in prison for attending a Trump rally. He should stress that a rule of law cannot be partisan.

Trump should say that the US economy needs more balance than it has between Wall Street’s and billionaire’s gains and the incomes of the rest of the people. Trump should ignore, not respond to, the “moderator” and questioners and speak directly to Americans without acknowledging hostile questioners. When it is his turn to speak, he should say what needs to be said and ignore loaded questions designed to paint a target on him. Trump must contain his aggressive and combative style, address the issues that threaten us and not make the usual political promises that indicate just another pandering politician buying votes. He should say that if elected, what he can do also depends on who voters put in the House and Senate. If he is hamstrung with a Democrat Congress, he will be deterred by another four years of false accusations and impeachments.

The Democrats and the media have been studying Trump’s personality and know how to provoke him into a rage that the presstitutes can then use to portray him as angry, intolerant, unstable. Trump must not play into their hands. If Trump follows these suggestions, it will be difficult for the Democrats to again steal the election as most Americans will know that there is nothing in a candidate with these positions not to like.

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If you’re an academic, you may actually think you matter..

• Professors Rally Academics Around ‘Less Bad’ Candidate Trump (Caldwell)

University professors have started a petition for academics to rally behind Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The petition statement, a project of Professor Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Daniel Mahoney, professor emeritus of political science at Assumption University, encourages scholars to support the Republican candidate. As of Thursday, 51 professors had signed it. The list so far represents a mix of emeritus and current scholars from both private and public universities, including well known institutions and state schools. Titled “Lesser Evil,” it emphasizes the founding principle of individual liberty while decrying big government, and affirms the Declaration of Independence’s exaltation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the “chief aims of good governance.”

According to Klein, Republicans are more predisposed to oppose stark centralization, hence his support for what he deems the “lesser evil”: the Republican presidential candidate. “Except for a few odd places and a very few odd units on a few campuses, academia is a leftist apparatus. Academia continues to get worse,” Klein told The College Fix in a recent email. In his estimation, “it is less than 10 percent of professors who think R > D.” The petition comes amid concerns over ideological diversity on college campuses. Reports by The Fix and others have found university faculty lean heavily Democrat. Since The Fix’s first contact with Klein in late August, the number of signatures has doubled. The list will continue to be updated with new signatures through the November election. “The initiative might help the Republicans to win, and certainly can’t hurt,” Klein said.

To emphasize the crux of their message, the professors included a graphic on the petition website, “Democrats bad, Republicans less bad,” that breaks down where the two parties stand on various issues, including taxes, religious liberty, censorship, asset forfeiture, and energy policy. Continuing, Klein told The Fix other reasons for the project are “(1) To normalize the voicing of the R > D opinion within academia. (2) To get my fellow classical liberals to face up to their responsibility to decide whether R > D or D > R, as well as their responsibilities, to come to that decision virtuously and to be frank and open about holding their opinion.” If the petition succeeds in getting professors to re-think their political leanings, it could cultivate a more amicable atmosphere for right-leaning students and professors. Klein, however, said conservatives shouldn’t hold their breath.

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“..US sanctions “don’t need to be lifted, they need to be bypassed.”

• Trump Repeats Putin Bribe (Helmer)

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeated his promise to end the Ukraine war the day after his re-election with a bribe for President Vladimir Putin and his two pro-American constituencies, the Central Bank of Russia and the Russian oligarchs. Applauded by an audience of New York lawyers and businessmen on Thursday afternoon, September 5, Trump answered a question from a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer, Rodgin Cohen, who asked if Trump “would strengthen or modify any of these economic sanctions, particularly Russia.” Trump replied that sanctions “ultimately kill the dollar and kill everything the dollar represents. We have to continue to have that be the world currency…I think that if we lose the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war. That would make us a third world country…you’re losing Iran; you’re losing Russia.China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant one…I want to use sanctions as little as possible.”

Instead, Trump proposed penalty tariffs on hostile-country trade with the US. “I stopped wars with the threat of tariffs…The biggest threat you have is that you lose that [dominant] currency, and we have lost something we can never get back…. If we win [on November 5], I believe I can settle that war while I am president-elect, before I ever get into office… Sanctions have to be used very judiciously. We have things much more powerful, actually, than sanctions – we have trade [tariffs] but we cannot lose our dollar standard. Very important.”. The mainstream US media have not reported what Trump said. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post – all supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in their campaign coverage – ignored the Economic Club meeting entirely. The Hill, a Washington-based publication for political specialists, headlined its report, “5 takeaways from Trump’s economic address in New York”, but the report didn’t include the sanctions proposal.

The next day, September 6, the New York Times reported Trump at a rally in Wisconsin: “though American spy agencies have assessed that the Kremlin favors Mr. Trump, the former president made light of President Vladimir V. Putin’s apparently sarcastic [sic] statement recently that he supported Ms. Harris. ‘He endorsed Kamala,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘I was very offended by that. I wonder why he endorsed Kamala. No, he’s a chess player.’” RT, the Russian state propaganda organ, did not notice Trump’s remarks on sanctions. But it reported his next-day attack on Putin for endorsing Harris, emphasizing, like the Times about Putin, that Trump was speaking tongue in cheek. Last week in New York Trump was rehearsing presentation of his economic policies ahead of the television debate with Harris scheduled for Tuesday.

He was also repeating the “limited sanctions relief” proposal recommended to Trump in April by his former staffers, US Army Lieutenant-General (retired) Keith Kellogg and Frederick Fleitz, a 19-year CIA official and race war fighter. In Moscow there have been several signals of Putin’s readiness to negotiate on Trump’s terms. The president’s deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kirienko, told a group of Kremlin officials and consultants working on US election propaganda in 2022 that the US sanctions “don’t need to be lifted, they need to be bypassed.”

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“..started asking questions about whether this was a good deal and it was at that point that it fell apart..”

• Nuland Confirms West Told Zelensky To Abandon Peace Deal (RT)

Kiev consulted with the US, UK and other allies during the 2022 Istanbul peace talks with Russia and was told that the deal on the table was not a good one, former US under secretary of state Victoria Nuland has said. In an interview with Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, former editor-in-chief of the opposition news channel Dozhd, which aired on Thursday, Nuland was asked to comment on reports that the peace process between Moscow and Kiev in late March and early April 2022 collapsed after then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Ukraine and told Vladimir Zelensky to keep fighting.

“Relatively late in the game the Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going and it became clear to us, clear to the Brits, clear to others that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s main condition was buried in an annex to this document that they were working on,” she said of the deal being discussed by the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Türkiye’s largest city. The proposed agreement included limits on the kinds of weapons that Kiev could possess, as a result of which Ukraine “would basically be neutered as a military force,” while there were no similar constraints on Russia, the former diplomat explained. “People inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal and it was at that point that it fell apart,” Nuland said.

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“Somewhere in that double negative, journalism perished.”

• Democrats Aren’t Creating Disorder; They’re Preserving it (Turley)

In 1968, in the midst of Democratic convention riots, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley famously declared, “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” Democratic state election officials appear to have adopted a similar approach to the upcoming election. In states such as North Carolina and Michigan, Democrats are fighting to keep the name of Robert Kennedy, Jr. on the ballot even though he withdrew from the race and endorsed former president Donald Trump. These are key states where the misplacement of even 1 percent of votes could turn the outcome of not just the state but the entire election. In Michigan, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson recently fought to keep third-party candidate Cornel West off the ballot. Unlike Kennedy, who is viewed as likely to drain votes from Trump, West is viewed as pulling votes from Vice President Kamala Harris, particularly among those opposed to her policies toward Israel.

A court ruled against Benson and said that she was adopting an artificially narrow interpretation to keep Kennedy on the ballot. In North Carolina, where Trump and Harris are in a statistical tie, Democrats also refused to remove Kennedy’s name. An appellate court this week ordered them to do so to avoid the obvious confusion for voters. Recently, the same Democratic officials sought to block West from the ballot due to his campaign causing “partisan mischief.” These efforts are being pursued in other states such as Wisconsin (another key state), where Democrats on the election board blocked a Republican effort to remove Kennedy’s name. In Michigan and North Carolina, officials have the distinction of fighting to keep a popular candidate from the ballot while fighting to retain a non-existent candidate. It is all in the name of protecting democracy from itself.

Previously, Democrats in Florida and North Carolina fought to block other Democrats from appearing on primary ballots. Candidates like Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), author Marianne Williamson and commentator Cenk Uygur faced concerted campaigns by election officials and advocates to prevent voters from having a choice in the primary. After preventing a meaningful primary and securing the nomination for President Biden, Democrats later handed the nomination to Harris without a single vote from a single primary voter. Democratic activists are now calling it an election by “acclamation,” like a political version of the immaculate conception in which a candidate is simply conceived by the party elite. It is enough to make the Chinese Central Committee blush.

Harris was then walled off from the media to avoid any unscripted interactions, including by putting earbuds in her ears in what many called a clearly fake call to avoid press questions. At the same time, Democratic supporters are now arguing that it is not necessary for Harris to offer detailed plans or agree to interviews in a campaign that is selling “joy” and “good vibes” like political valium. Others appear to believe that saving democracy means holding Harris to a different, more deferential standard. New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to defend treating Harris differently: “I think the challenge, not just for journalists, but really for the country, is that not only is Donald Trump a threat, but, you know, it lowers the bar. So, I don’t think it’s unacceptable,” she said. Somewhere in that double negative, journalism perished.

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“Musk has proven the single greatest barrier to the global anti-free speech movement.”

• The Prosecution of Elon Musk for “Undermining” the Federal Government (Turley)

Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee this weekend went on MSNBC’s “Last Word” and called for the arrest of Elon Musk for “undermining” the federal government by sharing his opinions on X. McNamee is the latest denizen of the global elite to call for criminalizing speech to silence those with opposing views.McNamee is the founding partner of Elevation Partners and has a colorful history as a band member, a volunteer for Eugene McCarthy and a protester against Vietnam. As discussed in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage”, he is like many liberal baby boomers now joining the anti-free speech movement. They have decided that free speech, once the defining right for the left, is now an existential threat.

McNamee’s rationale for criminalizing speech is chillingly shallow and irrational. He declared that somehow Musk’s political views made him a danger as the head of companies of major importance to the United States. It does not bother him when CEOs adopt far left views, just Musk opposing some of those views: “You have somebody who runs a really strategic defense and aerospace projects for the federal government who’s actively undermining the government that’s paying him. And somewhere in that is a legal case that needs to be prosecuted.” Perish the thought that a CEO might undermine the government. McNamee is using the government contracts with SpaceX as a reason to censor Musk’s political and social views.

“The critical element in thinking about Elon Musk is that, like any American, he has a right to his own opinion, and he has a right to express his opinion. However, that right is not unlimited. He is under some special limitations that would not apply to normal people because his company, specifically Starlink and SpaceX are government contractors and, as such, he has obligations to the government that would, for any normal person, and should for him, require him to moderate his speech in the interest of national security.” So, according to McNamee, if your company makes something that the government wants (including rescuing the currently stranded astronauts in space), he must give up his right to express political views, including against censorship. McNamee embraces the power of the government to dictate viewpoints or at least silence certain views as a matter of national security. It is no accident that the overriding objective is to “get Musk.” Musk has proven the single greatest barrier to the global anti-free speech movement.

Trump Elon https://twitter.com/i/status/1832818848485011566

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“A witty woman of the time commented: “If we weighed the votes, Monsieur Hugo would be elected; but we’re counting them.”

• Enabling a “Brutus” to Slay the Elon Musk “Caesar” (Alastair Crooke)

In the Washington Post on Monday, the headlines read: Musk and Durov are facing the revenge of the regulators. Former U.S. Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, in the British Guardian newspaper, published a piece on how to ‘rein-in’ Elon Musk, suggesting that “regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest” on lines of that which befell Pavel Durov recently in Paris. As should be clear to all now, ‘war’ has broken out. There is no need for further pretence about it. Rather, there is evident glee at the prospect of a crackdown on the ‘Far-Right’ and its internet users: i.e. those who spread ‘disinformation’ or mal-information that ‘threatens’ the broad ‘cognitive infrastructure’ (which is to say, what the people think!). Make no mistake, the Ruling Strata are angry; they are angry that their technical expertise and consensus about ‘just about everything’ is being spurned by the ‘deplorables’.

There will be prosecutions, convictions and fines for cyber ‘actors’ who disrupt the digital ‘literacy’, the ‘leaders’ warn. Professor Frank Furedi observes: “There is an unholy alliance of western leaders – Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz – whose hatred of what they call populism is undisguised. In his recent visits to Berlin and Paris, Starmer constantly referred to the threat posed by populism. During his meeting with Scholz in Berlin on 28 August, Starmer spoke about the importance of defeating “the snake oil of populism and nationalism”. Furedi explained that as far as Starmer was concerned, populism was a threat to the power of the technocratic élites throughout Europe:

“Speaking in Paris, a day later, Starmer pointed to the far Right as a ‘very real threat’ and again used the term ‘snake oil’ of populism. Starmer has never stopped talking about the ‘snake oil of populism’. These days virtually every political problem is blamed on populism … The coupling of the term snake-oil with populism is constantly used in the propaganda of the technocratic political elite. Indeed, tackling and discrediting snake oil populists is its number one priority”. So, what is the source of the élite’s anti-populist hysteria? The answer is that the latter know that they have become severed from the values and respect of their own people and that it is only a matter of time before they are seriously challenged, in one form or another. This reality was very much on view in Germany this last weekend, where the ‘non-Establishment (i.e. non Staatsparteien) parties – when added together – secured 60% of the vote in Thüringen and 46% in Saxony.

The Staatsparteien (the nominated establishment parties) choose to describe themselves as ‘democratic’, and to label the ‘others’ as ‘populist’ or ‘extremist’. State media even hinted that what counted more were ‘democratic’ votes; and not non-Staatsparteien votes, so the party with the most Staatsparteien votes should form the government in Thüringen. These have co-operated to exclude AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and other non-Establishment parties from parliamentary business as far as legally possible – for instance by keeping them out of key parliamentary committees and the imposition of various forms of social ostracism. It reminds of the story of the great poet Victor Hugo’s membership rejection – no less than 22 times – by the Académie Française. The first time he applied, he received 2 votes (out of 39) from Lamartine and Chateaubriand, the two greatest men of letters of their time. A witty woman of the time commented: “If we weighed the votes, Monsieur Hugo would be elected; but we’re counting them.”

Why war? Because, after the 2016 U.S. election, the U.S. political backroom élites blamed democracy and populism for producing bad election outcomes. Anti-establishment Trump had actually won in the U.S.; Bolsonaro won too, Farage surged, Modi won again, and Brexit etc., etc. Elections were soon proclaimed to be out of control, throwing out bizarre ‘winners’. Such unwelcome outcomes threatened the deep-seated structures that both projected and safeguarded long-seated U.S. oligarchic interests around the globe, by subjecting them (oh the horror!) to voter scrutiny. By 2023, the New York Times was running essays headlined: “Elections Are Bad for Democracy”.

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The narrative on its head.

• Russia Remains Hackers’ Top Target for Past 2.5 Years – Kaspersky (Sp.)

Hackers continue cyberattacks on Russia, the country has been the most attacked country in the world for the past 2.5 years, Anna Kulashova, Kaspersky Lab’s Managing Director for Russia and the CIS, told Sputnik. “Russia remains the most attacked country in cyberspace for more than two and a half years,” Kulashova said. In the first eight months of 2024, more than half of Russians who use Kaspersky Lab products were attacked. The financial and public sectors, telecommunications, media and industry are attracting the most attention from attackers. According to her, the problem of “hacktivism” remains relevant, when attackers can damage a company’s operations to draw attention to social or political problems. However, cyberattacks are still often committed for financial gain and espionage.

“The compromise of organizations can begin with the use of vulnerabilities in publicly available applications, user credentials obtained, including as a result of brute-force attacks, as well as attacks through small companies — contractors of larger businesses,” Kulashova explained.

She recalled that in early July, the company recorded two waves of targeted mailings to domestic businesses with malicious archives or links inside. The recipients were about a thousand employees of organizations from the manufacturing, finance and energy sectors, as well as government agencies. In the event of a successful attack, the attackers could gain remote access to the organizations’ computers, download files and confidential documents from them. Fortunately, all attacks were blocked. Also this summer, the company identified a series of complex targeted attacks on Russian IT companies and government organizations. The attackers carefully disguised their malicious activity, using popular websites such as Dropbox. The malicious campaign was aimed at stealing official information, Kulashova noted.

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No, Donald, de-dollarization is not about payments involving the US. It’s between other countries, not in dollars, out of American reach. You’re not getting that back.

• Trump Unveils Plan To Stop De-Dollarization (RT)

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has claimed that dumping the US dollar will be extremely costly for foreign countries which pursue the policy, adding that they will face unprecedented import taxes for pursuing non-dollar trade. Speaking to his supporters during a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, the former US president pledged to maintain the status of the greenback as the world’s reserve currency, emphasizing that it is “under major siege” as a growing number of states have been turning to other ways of settling trades. “You leave the dollar and you’re not doing business with the US, because we are going to put a 100% tariff on your goods” Trump said.

A broad trend towards using national currencies instead of the greenback has gained momentum following the massive economic restrictions introduced against Russia by the US and its allies in the wake of the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict in February 2022. After being cut off from the Western financial system, Moscow has turned to alternative options for settlement, with some of Russia’s foreign partners following suit. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia hadn’t been pursuing a de-dollarization policy, but was forced to look for other options after a series of unprecedented measures, including Russia’s central bank being cut off from dollar transactions, a ban on the transfer of US banknotes to the country, and the freezing of the country’s forex reserves.

According to Putin, Moscow and its BRICS partners are now using national currencies in 65% of mutual trade settlements. Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been planning to discuss a shift to settlements in local currencies instead of the US dollar, euro, yen and pound sterling. The combined GDP of the economic bloc, which includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, reportedly amounts to $4 trillion. Last week, the presidential candidate pledged to substantially reduce the use of sanctions by Washington if he is reelected in November. Speaking at the Economic Club of New York, Trump acknowledged that the curbs imposed by the US on other states are damaging for the dollar.

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No way Boeing can afford this; they’re broke. And share prices rise…

• Boeing Offers Staff 25% Pay Hike In Bid To Avoid Strike (BBC)

Boeing is offering its staff a 25% pay rise over four years in a bid to avoid a strike that could potentially shut down its assembly lines as early as Friday. Union leaders representing more than 30,000 employees have urged the workers to support the proposal, describing it as the best contract they had ever negotiated. If approved, the agreement would be an important achievement for Boeing’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, who faces pressure to fix the company’s quality and reputational issues. Boeing workers in the Seattle and Portland region are set to vote on the deal on Thursday. If the deal is rejected, however, a second ballot will need to be approved by two-thirds of union members for a strike to go ahead. In a video message to Boeing workers, the aerospace giant’s chief operating officer, Stephanie Pope, described the proposal as a “historic offer”.

If ratified by members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union, it would be the first full labour agreement between the firm and the unions in 16 years. The current contract between Boeing and the unions was first reached in 2008 following an eight-week strike. The two sides agreed to extend it in 2014 and it is now due to expire later this week. Although the preliminary deal did not match the union’s initial target of a 40% pay rise, negotiators still praised it and advised members to accept it. “We can honestly say that this proposal is the best contract we’ve negotiated in our history,” the IAM said in a statement. Aside from the pay rise, the deal offers workers improved healthcare and retirement benefits, and 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

It also includes a commitment from Boeing to build its next commercial plane in the Seattle area if the project is started during the lifetime of the contract. It is not clear when the company will announce its next jet. The deal also gives the union members more say on safety and quality issues. “Financially, the company finds itself in a tough position due to many self-inflicted missteps. It is IAM members who will bring this company back on track,” the union negotiators said, referring to the crises faced by Boeing in recent years. Mr Ortberg, an aerospace industry veteran and engineer, took over as Boeing’s new chief executive last month. His appointment came as the firm reported deepening financial losses and continued to struggle to repair its reputation following recent in-flight incidents and two fatal accidents five years ago.

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The end of the EU’s open borders system. They did this themselves.

• Germany Announces Tougher Border Controls (RT)

Germany will reimpose passport controls on its land borders for at least the next six months, in order to curb “irregular migration,” the government in Berlin has said. Germany has a 3,700km long land border with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland. All are members of the EU Schengen Zone. “We are strengthening our internal security through concrete action and we are continuing our tough stance against irregular migration,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Monday, announcing the measure. “We are doing everything we can to protect the people in our country against this,” Faeser added.

Passport controls are scheduled to begin next Monday and last for six months, unless renewed by Berlin. According to Faeser, they are intended to crack down on people entering Germany without visas and address threats from “Islamist terror groups” and transnational organized crime. Germany ramped up controls on the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland last year, in response to “a sharp increase in first-time asylum requests,” according to the state broadcaster DW. Those controls were also billed as temporary, but have been repeatedly extended. Last month’s stabbing spree at a diversity festival in Solingen, when three people were killed and eight wounded, has triggered renewed debate among Germans about the mass migration from outside the EU. The suspect, a 26-year-old Syrian, had reportedly sought asylum in 2022.

The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) parties made significant gains in the state elections in Thuringia and Saxony last week. The ruling coalition – which includes Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats – is facing another tough vote in Brandenburg later this month. The government has reportedly been in discussions about tackling migration with the mainstream opposition parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU). Immigrants make up an estimated 18% of Germany’s population, by official estimates. Of those, almost 40% have lived in the country for less than 10 years.

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RFK cellphone

 

RFK https://twitter.com/i/status/1832858297017442494

Elton John

 

 

Lioness https://twitter.com/i/status/1833013490354622545

 

 

Snow https://twitter.com/i/status/1833157228292894734

 

 

Fasting https://twitter.com/i/status/1833098667785392336

 

 

 

 

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